Today’s competitive business environment is forcing organizations to look for ways to reduce back-office processing costs and gain efficiencies while improving staff productivity. Eliminating paper from your Accounts Payable invoice processing is a logical way to do this – and many AP departments are already considering ways to accomplish this. If your vendors send you their invoices via email or as a PDF file, it’s a good first step – but it doesn’t solve the problem. These emails and PDF files are simply digital versions of invoice, and without an easy, accurate way to access the data on the invoice, they don’t add a lot of value. In fact, we often run into companies that print these PDF files and process them on paper! Others that use data capture such as OCR (Optical Character Recognition) or ICR (Intelligent Character Recognition) are learning that these processes require a lot of training and human review to ensure accurate data capture. You might just be shifting labor from paper handling to OCR tuning and error correction and doing very little to improve efficiencies in your process.
The Roadmap to Paperless
How far down the road to 100% paperless can you go? And how to do so?
Take our AP Quiz and you will receive our white paper on “Operational and Strategic Benefits in Automating Accounts Payable” to gain new perspectives on AP automation, plus a chance win a $25 Amazon gift card. We think that there may be different approaches depending on a variety of factors such as the nature of your business, the diversity and size of your vendor base etc. But a key factor in receiving invoices electronically is how easy you make it for your vendors to get their invoices to you in a paperless manner. Take our quiz now and gain valuable insight on electronic invoicing.
High invoice volume suppliers, (bigger and more sophisticated companies) are more likely to send you electronic data files (true e-invoices) that you can ingest directly into ERP, because the process automation helps them just like it does you. Iron Mountain provides a Supplier Network at no cost to suppliers, with no file format restrictions and an on-boarding team that reaches out to suppliers to integrate their e-invoices. This means that you can now receive 100% accurate e-invoices, directly with no resource or effort requirement from your side as the buying organization.
For your Lower volume suppliers, it might be that e-invoicing doesn’t grant the same efficiencies. But Iron Mountain offers you help here as well, by providing a Supplier Portal where companies can submit their invoices directly into your system. Both options are no cost to suppliers and ensure they get their invoices acknowledged quickly. And you get the benefit of receiving electronic data that you can pass directly into ERP for payment. The rest, the refuseniks, who want to stick with paper, can still use PDF attachments, email or plain paper. Iron Mountain has a “catch all” that can handle these too.
If you’re making an outsourcing decision and your goal is to lower costs, free up staff/resources and cut processing time, please consider working with Iron Mountain, who can provide a comprehensive service for practically any vendor. You can free up staff for more productive work and finally get to those projects that create more value for your company and improve your cash flow.
Making a business case for the Iron Mountain approach to AP internally should be straightforward since a) there is no significant up-front capital expense required and b) recurring processing costs should be lower. And of course we can archive, store, retrieve and destroy e-invoices as well.
Learn more about AP automation by taking our AP Quiz and receive a complimentary copy of our “Operational and Strategic Benefits in Automating Accounts Payable” white paper and you’ll also be entered to win a $25 Amazon gift card. And if you want help in putting this together and finding the direct route to paperless AP then call us at 800-899-IRON, we’d be glad to talk.
————————————————————————————————————————————————————