THE BUSINESS REVIEW FOR PROCUREMENT LEADERS
By Malcolm Wheatley
Are procurement functions missing a trick when it comes to electronic invoicing and payment solutions? The evidence suggests they are, says business and technology journalist Malcolm Wheatley.
Despite paper-based processes being inefficient, costly, slow and error-prone, relatively few organisations appear to have automated their account payable functions. For their part, purchasing professionals tend not to be measured on or incentivised to improve administrative efficiency, and this part of the P2P process is often not seen as particularly strategic.
However, the prize on offer may be worth having. The first benefit of e-invoicing is raw data for spend analysis; the second is better monitoring and contract compliance by mandating an electronic payment process – an approach taken at Barclays Bank in the UK; and a third is taking advantage of the discounts available by paying suppliers on time or even early.
E-invoicing need not require an expensive technological “big bang” either. Scanning and OCR-based data entry can be useful intermediate steps on the road to a fully automated process. Recent legislative changes, notes one vendor, now make it possible to keep scanned invoices, rather than the originals, as records.
