All businesses, big or small, have active participation in the process of invoice generation and processing. However, according to research and studies, limited businesses are aware of the actual intricacies involved in conforming invoice accuracy. One common reason why companies invest in invoice automation is to directly target the potential pain points within the operation cycle to avail multiple benefits for themselves.
Common Pain Points
In the business industry, operations and networking efficiency hold high weightage in the overall performance and profitability. There are certain pain points that hinder successful invoice processing and timely payments and some of them are as follows:
- Invoice duplication usually happens due to negligence towards thorough cross checking of each invoice individually. Duplication can lead to advance payments and reduced vendor satisfaction.
- Delayed payments between company and vendors is a common concern for any business. This usually takes place when the invoice raised does not match the company invoice data.
- The gap between purchase orders and payments is another common pain point, especially for businesses as releasing payments before the correct purchase order can negatively affect their overall cash flow statements.
- Inefficient team effort as the majority of the companies still relies on individual processing of invoices. This dependence can lead to major loopholes in the overall department, causing inaccurate data production and untimely payments.
The main goal for every business owner today is to streamline their operations and increase their cost management efficiency by making the most of the available technologies. Cost effectiveness and increased efficiency directly impact the overall business ROI and profitability. Traditional methods of invoicing are more challenging today as human resources lack the necessary skill set to promise accuracy.
Few easily available invoice processing automations methods include the following:
#1 Invoice Due Reminders
Not tracking the due invoice payments and unintentionally forgetting to send formal reminders for due payments and invoice generation can directly impact the operations cycle of a business. To effectively increase a company’s overall profitability, automating invoice reminders through focused automation software called C3- Cognitive Content Capture by Bautomate can be highly beneficial.
All you are required to do is feed up the vendor details and invoice generation and payment schedule to allow the software to manage and send out due reminders to respective vendors in advance.
#2 Automatic Reconciliations
One key necessity for any accounts department for any business, small or big, is to have accurate and timely account reconciliations for each of their vendors and other business partners. For vendors, invoice data and purchase order requirements have to match in order to receive full payment.
With the help of invoice automation and effective documentation softwares like BautoDocs by Bautomate, you do not have to put in manual labour work to reconcile each invoice individually as the process is inbuilt in such softwares look after it efficiently.
#3 Online invoice data extraction
Creating separate invoices for the same vendor can be tedious and demotivating for manual labour or office employees in general. However, with invoice automation, you can avail the facility of quick and effective extraction of data shared on previous invoices to generate new invoices under the same vendor name for future payments.
#4 Automated Invoice Payment
Top companies with multiple vendors and suppliers witness untimely or uncoordinated payments against all raised invoices. This in turn has an adverse effect on the overall company image, with increased friction between the vendors and the business due to non-payment and the high application of late payment penalties.
However, by opting for automated invoice payments, this gap can be reduced greatly while increasing the overall company productivity simultaneously. The end goal is to close the gap between the time taken for invoice generation and the time taken for payments.
#5 Automated Invoice Generation
Another major concern for companies, especially multinationals, is manual invoicing. Even though professionals in the field with high expertise carry out the process, the room for error is still higher, especially when huge volumes of invoicing is required. This leads to vendor dissatisfaction and cash flow imbalances
However, with the help of different invoice automation softwares, businesses can successfully introduce automation for invoice generation, reducing the potential scope of error by a huge percent. One popular software by Bautomate called C3 offers advanced functional processing of invoices by capturing the electronic and OCR produced data and then generating required invoices, as per the purchase order.
#6 Schedule future payments invoices
Just as Google calendar keeps a track of all your upcoming business meetings, Bautomate platform solutions focus on creating a calendar sheet that allows you to manually plan out and schedule invoice payments for the next few weeks with just a few clicks.
Moreover, in case you require complete anonymity and automation, you can leave in the commands and let the software schedule the payments on its own.
#7 Google Forms and Sheets
Data is the key resource that is required for invoice processing and generation. Without complete and accurate data, expecting correct invoicing through traditional human resource methodology can be dissatisfying.
However, by introducing Google forms in sheets for data collection, a business can reduce the hassle of invoice processes and overall decrease the payment delays to vendors by a big margin.
Benefits Of Invoice Automation
As a business, when you decide to automate invoice processing, you open up more potential doors to expand and grow. This is because the human resources tied down by the traditional method of invoicing can now use the time and energy into business development and growth. Other benefits include:
- With invoice automation, you can save more time and use it more effectively to plan out other business activities and operations.
- Turning digital for invoice processing automation can guarantee higher accuracy and lower risk or error grounds. Additionally, you can also pre-fill required vendor data on documents digitally from the database.
- The future is cloud and so choosing invoice automation reduces the hassle and chaos of paper processes, while motivating the accounts team to work harder to keep up with the new adaptations.
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Overall, with cloud computing and digitization slowly taking over full control of the overall business industry, it is very essential to hop on and adapt your business processes like invoice processes to the technology in demand. Luckily, to help ease this shift, much in-voice automation software are available so find the one that suits your needs the best and start the transition today. It might seem time-consuming in the beginning, but in near future, it will turn down the invoice payment gaps completely.
Originally published at https://www.bautomate.com on July 16, 2021.
