When PayStream posed the question, where’s the craziest place you’ve found a missing invoice to leading Account Payable industry representatives, we found some of the answers quite shocking and comical. However, it wouldn’t take Sherlock Holmes to solve the case of the missing invoice, if these companies had implemented e-invoice technology.
PayStream has highlighted three of the top responses to our question. Please note that company names were withheld for privacy purposes.
Interoffice Ooops
James Gladstone from a leading hotel chain writes, “In a previous company, we were cleaning up to move, and I found an interoffice envelope behind some file cabinets. I looked inside and there was an invoice returned from the customer with a $5,000 payment. The check/invoice was over two years old. We had such poor controls, no one even knew it was missing and just carried the receivable for two years. The funny thing is we deposited the check, knowing for sure it would be rejected for a stale date, but it cleared, and the customer never even said anything.”
Disgruntled Delivery
Robin Holcomb is in the transportation industry and provided us with a more scandalous missing invoice story, stating, “Many years ago, we apparently had some very disgruntled truck drivers (as we were in the middle of a labor dispute). Instead of delivering the big red mail bags, they decided to hide them in the ceiling rafters above the dropped ceiling tiles at several of our locations. Those bags weren’t found for YEARS…in fact they only surfaced when the ceiling had to be dismantled for replacement. In addition to vendor invoices – the ‘lost’ mailbags contained customer checks, employee timecards, etc. I hate to even think about how much money all that rework ended up costing the company, due to the drivers’ shenanigans.”
ATM Blunder
Last, but not least, a national banking representative writes, “I once found an invoice with payment in an envelope that had managed to stay jammed inside one of our ATM’s that had been there for over 7 years! It was discovered years later while doing an in-depth maintenance on the ATM. It goes without saying that it was of no use advising neither the customer nor the company of the found payment/invoice.”
Why e-invoicing?
In addition to reducing the number of lost invoices to zero, there are a number of benefits to e-invoicing, including:
• Completely removes paper processing (there is no paper)
• Dramatically increases data quality (there is no manual data entry / OCR)
• Better reporting and visibility
• Greater opportunity to take early payment discounts
• Better supplier relationships
PayStream Advisors has issued a number of reports on e-invoicing. For more information regarding e-invoicing research, simply click on the Research Library tab on the PayStream Advisors website.
Look for other upcoming PayStream questions and surveys for your chance to win a Starbuck’s gift card. Congratulations to the missing invoice winner Robin Holcomb.
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