A Word About "Cost Per Invoice" in Your AP Department

Here at Tallega, we pride ourselves on keeping up with our industry -- Technology offerings, licensing trends, best practices, research, etc.  Recently, I was reading yet another report by a leading research group regarding the cost of processing invoices.  While the numbers change a little, the message has been the same for the last 20 years – an A/P process that is managed with completely manual processes is inefficient and is laden with cost-saving potential.

The report says that the role of the A/P department within all sizes of enterprises has changed “dramatically” over the past five years.  It also says; “nearly every survey shows that the focus is now on the control, coordination and analysis of key business processes to increase efficiency and reduce costs.”  I say, with all due respect; Rubbish! 

The role of the A/P department is, and has been, to pay invoices -- accurately and on-time.  I am in no way downplaying the importance of A/P, or denying that the process has become more challenging, however, this doesn’t change the core mission of A/P. 

What I find absolutely baffling is that it is still quite common to see A/P staff spending their time entering invoices manually into an ERP system and searching paper files for documents to validate the details of a transaction.  Why???  If you’re looking to reduce costs and get rid of inefficiencies, then there is a HUGE opportunity right in front of you!!!

Plenty of leading research firms have published surveys about the cost to process an invoice.  One leading firm says that “Best-in-Class” companies have driven their average cost/invoice down to $1.14 by automating their A/P process using advanced scanning and document imaging technology.

The fact is, we have no idea if that sounds great to you.  If your average cost to process an invoice is over $20 per invoice, this sounds awesome.  Benchmarks are helpful, but what really matters is how YOU measure these costs in your organization and if technology can really help lower your costs and eliminate double payments, late fees, losing invoices and a host of other issues that are a daily occurrence with paper-based processes.

We know you’ve heard about document management, OCR, workflow and a bunch of other technologies that should (in theory) do almost everything for you.  If you’ve been around for any length of time, you’ve probably either tried implementing something that didn’t work (OCR), or you’ve heard plenty of horror stories of implementations gone wrong.  We get it.

Here’s the thing; all of these technologies have come a long way over the past decade, and the advanced recognition technologies (fancy OCR) today honestly do work.  That said, it really doesn’t matter how good the technology is if:

1. You don’t know about it.

2. It isn’t right for your business.

3. If it isn’t deployed properly for your business.

You can read all the whitepapers you want (there are some really good ones on our site at (www.tallega.com/downloads), and you will definitely find some helpful information, however, identifying what will fit YOUR environment best and making sure it gets deployed correctly requires some expertise; that’s where we come in.  Give us a call and let’s talk about YOUR requirements.  It’s only when we know your environment that we can make the right recommendation for a solution.  After our discussion, we both can determine if it makes sense to move forward.

What if we really can help you lower your processing costs by 40%, 50%, even 60%?  Your cost to find out -- $0, FREE, NADA.  At the very least, you can find out what’s available and if it’s right for your business.  Go ahead, give us a call.  We're the best in the business so go ahead, give us a call today. (949) 367-9860