Manual invoice management is quickly becoming an antiquated method of processing payments as new technologies are mitigating its major pain points. Among them, overall costs to businesses are significantly decreasing while productivity is increasing. If your company is still conducting manual invoice management, it’s time to take a closer look at the major costs to your business that you might not yet be aware of.
It Slows Productivity
Labor accounts for as much as 70% of a company’s total business costs making productivity especially crucial. When you consider that it takes 25 days for small to midsize businesses to process a single invoice, it becomes evident that your employees’ time simply isn’t being used efficiently.
By implementing an automated system, like OCR’s InvoiceMax, that invoice processing time can be reduced to 3-5 days. InvoiceMax allows Account Payable departments to easily capture the image through whatever modality works best (email, smartphone, or a folder on the network) and the system does the work for you, offering employees a means to focus their efforts elsewhere.
It Monopolizes Employee Time
On average, invoicing manually costs companies between $12.90 and $15 per invoice with some businesses reporting paying as much as $40. A portion of this cost can be attributed to the loss of employee time as the process can be tedious.
On the same note, having skilled personnel performing a mundane, repetitive task is arguably a waste of resources as their talents could be utilized in other areas. Mistakes also tend to occur if a daily task becomes too monotonous, which means that even more time could be devoted to this process due to trying to track when and how the error occurred.
It Increases Errors Along The Way
Manually processing invoices requires a lot of moving parts and frequently requires documents to change hands multiple times.
Vendor → Accounts payable → Approval → Upper management approval → Accounts payable for final payment
By relying on more than one department, companies are more vulnerable to errorone missed email or lost paper can mean unpaid invoices. This can also lead to more time spent on reconciliations, which greatly impacts your bottom line. The possibility of error only increases as your company grows and more invoices come in.
With the pressure to process invoices quickly regardless of the stage they’re in at any given time, sticking with a manual process makes it easier for errors to occur and can severely bottleneck the process.
An Automated Approach
From talented employees overwhelmed with a boring, repetitive task to tiny errors that can create big problems later, automating your invoice process with customizable, easy-to-implement software is the ultimate solution to every pain point associated with manual invoice management.
OCR Solutions is the perfect partner to uplevel and streamline your processes. Their Automated Invoice Capture tool, InvoiceMax, is easily implemented and so user-friendly that most teams can begin working with it immediately. The system is completely customized for your use, which means that you have a team dedicated to analyzing your inefficiencies and offering a thoughtful and creative solution. Save valuable hours, eliminate errors, and significantly decrease costs with an updated and automated approach.
