The buyer side of electronic invoicing and its associated benefits have been covered in-depth in this and other reports. However, a lot of education is still required in understanding the value proposition to suppliers from adopting electronic invoice management solutions. Given that one of the biggest barriers to e-invoicing and payments is supplier adoption, rather the lack thereof, it is critical to look at e-invoicing from the supplier perspective. Suppliers who have jumped onboard the electronic bandwagon have reaped a number of tangible benefits from automating the invoice presentment and payment process.

While they vary with the type of solution implemented and functionality being used, here are some common benefits of e-invoicing to suppliers:

• Increased Efficiencies: Significant time is saved when employees do not have to print paper invoices and mail them to their customers, freeing up accounts receivable staff to focus on more value-added activities like collections and customer relations.
• Lower Costs:

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Lebhar-Friedman, Inc., is the leading information company for the retail, foodservice and healthcare industries with over 350 employees located in the United States, Europe & Asia. Lebhar-Friedman is a media company, made up of business units all dedicated to providing clients with the best B2B information online and in print.

While Lebhar-Friedman is headquartered in New York City, New York, the company’s accounts payable department is located in Tampa, Florida. The AP department is supported by three full time equivalents (FTE), who are responsible for processing 28,000 invoices and expense reports annually. Most of the invoices do not have a purchase order (PO) associated with them and have to be reviewed and approved; only the IT department uses POs, so PO-based invoices are a small component of the total invoice volume.

Struggling with People and Paper
Prior to 2007, when Lebhar-Friedman was not using any automation for invoice processing, suppliers sent invoices directly…

AP departments have finally jumped on the automation bandwagon and are using technologies like document imaging, data extraction, electronic invoicing and automated workflow to achieve both tactical benefits – cost containment and productivity enhancements – and strategic objectives – improved spend visibility, better vendor relations and enhanced discount capture.

But our research reveals that merely having the right technology in place is not enough to optimize the AP department performance.  Learn from the innovators about best practices that go hand in hand with technological tools.

• Centralize Invoice Receipt: If all invoices are sent to the AP department directly as a central location for receipt, organizations can drastically reduce problems such as lost/missing invoices and lack of visibility into invoice liabilities. In the 2008 IAPP Member Benchmarking Survey, members were asked to rank the importance of centralization, on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is low and 5 is high. More

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The regulatory environment surrounding sales and use tax is much more complex than most people realize…at least until you consider that there are over 13,000 taxing authorities in the USA, and that they made over 1400 rate changes in 2007.  Jurisdictional boundaries are constantly changing, too.  Incorporated municipalities regularly annex adjacent tracts of land, regional school districts often add or drop students from neighboring municipalities and so forth.  And while a jurisdiction’s sales tax rate may be quoted as 6 percent, the price point at which the next penny of tax is collected can vary from the first dollar to the second and even beyond.

How a product is used can also affect its taxability and multiple layers of taxing authorities create additional variables.  The typical fortune 500 corporation will offer over 1000 unique products and services, and will file returns each month with more than 74 different tax jurisdictions.  Even…

Did you ever wonder why business-to-business transactions are typically settled in 30 days? Why not when goods or services are delivered? Ironically, the concept of trade terms were invented by the Greeks who needed a system to allow for transportation delays. In today’s economies, we have eliminated many of these delays — and drastically improved the information flows about trade.  In fact, a new set of tools — Supply Chain Financing and Dynamic Discounting are rapidly changing the options around supplier payments.

Supply chain financing is demonstrating value in the weak economy as more organizations and suppliers learn how to use it, experts say. It’s most prevalent in retail and manufacturing, but ANY industry can take advantage of these tools due to the availability of new solutions. “Supply chain financing is still in the early stages”,” says Henry Ijams, managing director of PayStream Advisors research and consulting firm in Charlotte, N.C….

After years of lackluster performance, optical character recognition (OCR) for accounting has finally come of age. And it’s happened none too soon for accounts payable professionals, who have long been eager to automate the many time-consuming, labor-intensive tasks associated with their occupation.

Original A/P OCR and scanning applications were used primarily for back-end imaging and archiving.. This made retrieval easier and eliminated the cost, space, and effort associated with physical storage. Unfortunately, it didn’t offer much in the way of true productivity improvement, and the invoice receipt-to-pay cycle continued on its meandering (and manual) path.

In the next evolution, imaging and data extraction moved to the front of the payment cycle, occurring when invoices were received. While this did offer real time and productivity gains, it also highlighted the need for improved scanning speed, image quality, and recognition capability.

Today’s stellar crop of OCR A/P solutions are not only fast and  reliable, they…