Automating Invoice Management for improved transparency & efficiency

The way a company handles vendor invoices directly impacts the productivity of not only AP but also other lines of business. Lack of automation can increase cost per invoice, high cycle time due to manual intervention and  lack of exception handling mechanisms within SAP,  late payments & missed early-payment discounts, duplicate invoices and payments, poor supplier relations, miscommunication between the AP department and other groups with no centralized visibility on invoice processing leading to high regulatory risk. As a result of inefficiency, invoice processing costs in AP are often higher than desired, especially as transaction volume grows.

For many organizations, dealing with problem invoices is still largely a labor-intensive & manual process. While purchase and payments transactions are recorded in SAP software, the coordination, verification, matching, exception resolution, approval, and linking of all commonly associated transaction elements is handled manually outside the SAP software. These tasks misuse employee time that could be applied more effectively to knowledge-based work, increase cost per invoice & overall processing time.

CIOs & CFO’s  of the future need to take some cutting edge initiatives to enable business transformation. In simple words, you need to derive optimized results out of your investment on SAP applications. It’s time to efficiently manage your invoice process improving IT and business operations, increased transparency and enhance user productivity.

SAP Invoice Management by OpenText streamline account payables process, integrate with SAP transactions layer, provides out of box workflows & India localized validation rules to resolve exception scenarios within SAP reducing invoice processing time, eliminates manual intervention, automatically extract data from invoice image using OCR technology, gives centralized visibility on invoice processing moment from invoice getting scanned to posted with out-of-box  analytics & monitoring. SAP Invoice Management provide complete process history with 360 degree view of transactional data, supporting documents and workflow history along with audit trail. This application improves vendor relations with timely payments and empowers them via supplier self-service portal. The application routes problem invoices to the appropriate individuals for resolution and approval. It includes functionality for Web-based approval for internal users who do not log in to the SAP software system regularly.

SAP Invoice Management keeps an electronic, historical log of everything that occurs related to each process step. The combination of original and supporting documentation, comments and notes, routing histories, and historical logs of internal and external actions increases transaction visibility for every stakeholder in the process. These logs are available during the process and for audit purposes once the process is complete

Eliminating inefficiencies can result in significant benefits for the entire company, particularly for the AP, procurement, and receiving departments, as well as for all approvers. Benefits like headcount cost reductions, better on-time payment performance, improved vendor relations, better negotiating leverage, and reduced duplicate invoice payments are possible when this process is optimized. Additional AP improvements can include lower cost per invoice, more invoices processed per person, reduced percentage of problem invoices, and more. In some instances, corporate credit ratings may be improved through ontime invoice payment.

Major companies in industries such as Oil & Gas, consumer products, manufacturing, energy, pharmaceutical, utilities and telecommunications are enjoying the benefits of optimized & automated invoice-handling processes supported by SAP Invoice Management by OpenText.