Most of us at home have the pleasure of paying bills. They turn up all throughout the month, have different payment terms and frequencies, you will get pushed into receiving them electronically with the bribe of saving the environment, and they tend to sit in piles until you get around to paying them.
If you forget to pay on time, some of the companies like to impose penalties, or maybe this is disguised as an early payment discount if you are lucky!
If you are anything like me, you don’t sign up to the direct debit option where the supplier can take your life savings away on a whim.
For your business bills, it often is not too different.
Your accounts payable teams will be emailed the majority of supplier invoices now, and the first thing many of them do is print them out. They are sent in the internal mail to people to review and scribble a code and approval on, and then they come back to finance to enter into the finance system.
Sometimes in the process, extra copies are made and filed, someone scans and emails the printed documents to someone else, they get lost, duplicated and take time to get around the organisation. If you are very lucky, they make their way back to finance, are punched into the finance system just in time to make the next payment run.
Why don't we do this in a better way?
The good news? We can remove the paper mountain with an invoice automation system.
