When an organization’s invoice management process becomes sluggish, overly complicated, bloated, or outdated, it can dramatically disrupt the purchasing process, waste valuable time and resources, decrease employee productivity, and negatively impact your relationships with vendors.
Fortunately, using the right automation software can expedite the invoice management process, boosting productivity and your company’s bottom line.
What is the invoice management process?
Invoice management refers to internal business functions that process invoices to ensure company controls for accurate and on-time payments. It includes the management and processing of invoice documents received from suppliers and typically involves the following steps:
- Receive an invoice.
- Extract the invoice information.
- Validate and verify the invoice data.
- Resolve exceptions.
- Correctly code or verify the accounting involved, if necessary.
- Validate that all the approvals have been met for payment.
- Archive the invoice for future reference.
What could disrupt an organization’s invoice management process?
Many different factors can slow down a company’s invoice management process. Let’s take a look at some of the most common:
1. Manual Invoices
Manual invoices require more time to enter into a company’s accounts payable (AP) system. They’re also more prone to errors and inaccuracies and can even cause backlogs. When working with manual invoices, employees spend more time correcting, coding, chasing down approvals, or updating payment data.
2. Duplicate Invoices
Whether intentional or accidental, duplicate invoices can lead to lost revenue and late payments. It takes time and resources to identify and correct duplicate invoices, and employees often have to chase down credit from suppliers if the invoice was paid more than once.
3. Lack of Time
Repetitive, manual tasks are time-consuming for your AP department, giving them less time to spend on more complex tasks, such as conducting data analysis.
4. Late Payments
Late payments can lead to expensive and reputation-damaging penalties, fees, or additional charges, hurting your revenue and partnerships with suppliers.
5. Exceptions
Exceptions occur when an order and invoice don’t match. This can be due to a difference in price or quantity, taxes, shipping charges, or missing goods receipts. When exceptions occur, the accounts payable department must track down the person who can resolve the discrepancy, delaying the invoice management process.
However, the right invoice management solution can identify the person needed to resolve the exception, reducing the number of touches required for approval.
How can the right technology improve your company’s invoice management processes?
How can the right technology, like Vroozi, help resolve invoice management process issues? An automated solution reduces data entry and the likelihood of mistakes related to human error, giving AP more time to spend on complex tasks.
Vroozi’s cloud-based invoice management solutions provide:
- Duplicate invoice checks: Vroozi sends notifications if an invoice is a duplicate or possibly fraudulent using the Vroozi Intelligence engine. This reduces duplicate payments and time spent identifying errors.
- 2- and 3-way matching technology: This technology ensures that invoices match, reducing overpayments or costly mistakes.
- Data capture and coding: Using historical data from previous invoices ensures that information is correct and accurate coding is entered for accurate accounting
- Fewer exceptions: This technology can immediately identify the people needed to resolve an exception, reducing the number of touches required for resolution. This lowers AP’s workload dramatically, along with the time it takes to resolve exceptions.
Take your invoice management processes to the next level!
Vroozi Invoice + Intelligence eliminates hours of work for paper invoices, allowing your team to focus on more high-value work. Our cloud-based electronic invoicing system has built-in matching and automatically identifies errors, duplicates, and overpayments so you can ensure you only pay for what you’ve ordered and received. Book a demo today!
