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Speeding up the invoice approval time

by | July 22, 2019

Organisations nowadays have the fundamental need to cut costs and be more efficient. As a result, companies have started taking a much closer look at how they manage and track their spend. Having an e-invoicing solution can help bring a lot of advantages to these activities. 

Even today the invoice approval process can still be a very manual, paper heavy process. It can take up a huge amount of time, costs can be high, and when in this state, there isn’t much transparency over the whole process.

Invoices usually follow the same typical processes. Some may be paid right away, but others have to go through a different and more complex approval process, including physical document preparation, routing, manual data entry and error correction. Every time an invoice is manually handled the risk for errors increases.

There have been numerous recent discussions around paper waste and a lot of debates around how to go paperless and the inefficiency of different existing payment structures. The general consensus is that there are a lot more benefits in digitising your payments when switching to automated invoices.

Recent studies have shown that real-time payment delivery is important to 76% of consumers and 72% would be interested in getting alerts that a bill is due to avoid late payments. If it is important for consumers that payments are digitised, it should also be important for companies.

Challenges companies are facing with the invoice approval

  • Slow process – it takes time to manually process and approve every invoice. By having a slow process, deadlines may be falling behind and cash flow is influenced by this
  • Losing track of invoices – if you have a manual invoice process with physical invoices, it is quite common for papers to get lost and the process to be delayed because of this
  • Not enough transparency through the invoice process
  • High number of discrepancies and exceptions

By automating the invoice process organisations can gain a lot of benefits. It eliminates paperwork, reduces manual processing and accelerates the approval cycle.

The good news is that we live in this digitalised world and speeding the invoice approval time and process can be done relatively easy by implementing P2P automation software or by implementing e-invoicing.

The digitalisation of invoicing systems also allows more precise forecasting of supply, demand and delivery of goods and services. For more information on this subject read our whitepaper: It’s time to face your e-invoicing fears!