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Hype to hope to disappointment and finally acceptance and adoption – electronic procurement has experienced an extremely interesting lifecycle. During the early 2000s when it was fashionable to add the word “electronic” to every initiative, procurement automation appeared on a number of corporate agendas. A plethora of electronic procurement solutions cropped up in the marketplace and organizations were rushing to implement these in hopes of achieving tremendous cost savings, enhanced spend management capabilities and improved supplier relations.
Unfortunately, not every adopter of e-procurement saw the anticipated benefits materialize. Over the years, organizations have learned a big lesson; technology is not the be-all-and-end-all of an automation initiative; it is just an enabler. The key to a successful e-procurement program lies in the redesign of the procurement process and a strong strategy to leverage the available technology to meet each organization’s specific business requirements.
PayStream’s recent survey of procurement professionals from over 350 U.S.-based businesses reveals a renaissance of interest in Web-enabled procurement solutions – especially applications that have been enhanced by purchasing cards, approval workflow technologies and integration with online vendor catalogs.
Usage of Electronic Procurement Solutions
PayStream’s survey revealed that more than half (61%) of the companies that participated in the survey are currently using an electronic procurement solution. Almost half the adopters have been using their e-procurement solution for over five years.
Figure 1: Where does your organization stand when it comes to the usage of an electronic procurement solution?
Another 13 percent are evaluating e-procurement solutions for implementation over the next six months. What are the driving forces behind organizations’ need to implement or improve an electronic procurement solution? Almost a third (66%) of the companies surveyed stated that the biggest factor driving them down this route was the need to improve compliance – whether it was with contract terms, negotiated prices or regulatory requirements. This was followed by the need to lower costs, accelerate the requisition-to-order cycle and reduce maverick spend. In today’s economic climate, it is not surprising that every organization is looking for ways to drive costs out of the equation.
What is Holding Electronic Procurement Back?
Given that electronic procurement delivers tangible results, what is the reason more companies have not implemented a solution to automate their procurement process? According to our survey, the biggest barrier to the adoption of e-procurement is resistance to chance. Senior management’s belief that “current processes work” even though they may not be the most efficient is hampering e-procurement initiatives that more than a third (35%) of companies surveyed.
This was followed by a lack of understanding of solutions currently available, which was stated as a reason by 28 percent of organizations. In order to educate companies and help them overcome this hurdle, PayStream is developing a Technology Insights Series report titled “CFO’s View of Electronic Procurement” which will be released later this year.
Keep watching this space for more information on electronic procurement based on our survey results – challenges, benefits, best practices and gaining supplier acceptance.
One of the major barriers hindering electronic invoicing initiatives is gaining supplier adoption. Persuading suppliers to change their processes to align with buyer’s needs is a costly and time-consuming process, and success depends largely on the buyers’ ability to present a compelling value proposition to suppliers.
One option that organizations are pursuing to overcome this challenge is utilizing outsourcing services in conjunction with electronic invoicing initiatives. Under this scenario, suppliers that are reluctant to join an e-invoicing network, continue to send paper invoices. But instead of mailing them to the buyer’s AP department, suppliers send these invoices to a processing center managed by the e-invoice solution provider. At these processing centers, the documents are scanned and data is extracted from the paper invoices and converted into an electronic format. Data from both the paper and electronic invoices is then available for processing through a single unified platform.
Electronic invoicing solutions were explicitly designed to facilitate external buyer-supplier interactions, while front-end imaging applications evolved to meet organizations’ internal needs around invoice receipt and management. However, over the last few years, we have seen a convergence in invoice management landscape with both types of providers partnering or developing functionality to offer comprehensive solutions covering paper and electronic invoices and incorporating better options for invoice receipt, approval processing, and discrepancy resolution.
Benefits of Outsourcing Imaging and Data Capture
Buyer Side Benefits:
Organizations receive all their invoices in an electronic format, from day one, without having to wait to onboard a critical mass of suppliers on the e-invoicing network.
The AP department receives all invoices in a common format, irrespective of the channel of entry. The same robust validation rules that are applied to electronic invoices can be used to validate paper invoices as well.
Buyer organizations can see a reduction in FTE and processing costs that were originally associated with imaging and data entry from paper invoices.
Most third party outsourcing providers guarantee a 24 hour turnaround for invoice entry, which significantly compresses the invoice receipt-to-pay cycle, thereby allowing organizations to capture more early payment discounts.
Fewer supplier inquiries into invoice and payment status as suppliers have visibility into the entire process.
Supplier Side Benefits:
Requires minimal changes to the supplier-side process; Suppliers only have to change the address to which they mail in the paper invoices.
Suppliers have real-time visibility into invoice status - whether the invoice is being reviewed, is approved or is under dispute. Further, suppliers can speed up the process by submitting comments or supporting documents, if needed.
Electronic invoicing, combined with outsourced data capture, compresses the approval cycle, ensuring that suppliers are paid on time, or even early in some cases.
So you want to move to invoice automation – imaging, workflow, or even electronic invoicing. Problem is, your CFO, Controller, AP Manager, or IT staff hasn’t bought in. You’ve got a plan, but don’t have the buy-in to start.So what is the surefire way get your project approved?
PayStream has developed simple metric – PIQ (paper invoice quotient) – to analyze operations and simplify the way management thinks about AP. PIQ is a simple way to better communicate the opportunity to management. It is a score derived from a standardized survey to measure your organization’s level of dependency on paper in AP.
PIQ includes two different concepts: efficiency and effectiveness.For example, an efficiency metric would be determining that your cost is $6 per invoice to process. The effectiveness metric is how long it takes to process that invoice. Typically, AP will say that it takes 24 or 48 hours to process, or during rush times maybe a week. However, that’s only part of the story. You need to know how long the invoice takes from the viewpoint of the supplier or CFO.
PIQ tracking starts at the invoice date and ends on the day the corresponding voucher is approved in your accounting system. The PIQ is then calculated by taking the approval time divided into the percentage of electronic invoices. By weaving in these two concepts, PIQ makes it simple for you to demonstrate opportunity to your senior managers.
Metrics and Your PIQ
PayStream conducted an AP Benchmarking Survey in the Fall of 2009 and asked survey respondents questions that would serve as guideposts to help other AP departments benchmark their business. The number one response (65 percent) to the biggest opportunity inside of AP was process inefficiency. Everyone wants to provide AP services cheaper, better, and faster.
The second ranked opportunity (53 percent) was improved visibility, which is driven around discount management. In other words, there’s a frustration, especially among senior managers, about invoices floating around the organization and not being in the company’s ERP system.
We call this “invoice float” because the invoice is moving around the organization and may be sitting on someone’s desk, perhaps because the person is on vacation, investigating a discrepancy, or wants to post the invoice in Q4 rather than Q3.
Envisioning Your ROI
The first source of ROI is AP efficiency. Reducing processing costs and speeding up the process will account for anywhere from 25 to 35 percent of the opportunity. The remaining percentage comes from spend visibility; how money is being spent and the timing of that spend. The next piece is working capital authorization. Having better visibility to the spend can allow you to take advantage of paying some suppliers early in exchange for a discount.
Having a broad foundation to your business case means bringing in other business units and working with your counterparts—including Treasury, Procurement, and Finance.It’s vitally important to consider all of these elements together.One of our clients received approval for an AP project in the past, only to have the assistant controller reallocate the funds to another project. When we did an analysis, we found that the AP manager had only included about 24 percent of his business case. He missed a huge chunk of opportunity.
The one tip that we always like to suggest is that you should visualize your ROI model.The first thing you will notice is that there is some red, which means that it’s going to cost money before you start saving money. The first thing that the people reviewing your business case want to know is how much the project is going to cost. It’s important to show that you have a realistic plan and understand that it will go negative before positive.
The Four Truths
When it comes to AP automation, there are four truths you need to face and overcome to achieve success:
1. Phantom Pain. The people who make the decisions about AP automation don’t really understand the pain of suboptimal processes, because they aren’tinvolved in AP. That’s why you need to make it simple for the CFO, controller, or IT manager to understand your pain and business case.
2. The End of Meaningless Metrics. To convince the right people, you have to communicate in their language, not the language of AP. Present your facts, compare yourselves with others, and show the the dollar value of your proposal. Make them feel the pain of a competitor or other recognizable innovator that is meaningful to them. Everyone wants to be least as good as or better than the Joneses, including your managers.
3. Making the Case. When building a broad foundation, remember that it’s not just about AP efficiency. It’s also about servicing your suppliers and making it easier for them to do business with you.
4. Destination Blues. You need to paint a picture of your vision; where you’re trying to go with automation. The vision is not that you’re going to use OCR or set up an electronic invoice portal, but rather that you want to move to a touchless process in AP. Management can equate a touchless process with reduced costs and increased visibility into the number of invoices and accruals. The destination blues involves convincing the people who need to approve your efforts.They won’t necessarily understand the technology, so you need to simplify it for them.
With so many sophisticated invoice and payment management solutions and services available in the marketplace today, why aren’t companies making headway in better managing their AP processes? Why aren’t more companies able to remove paper from their organizations, decrease processing costs and increase discount capture? PayStream Advisors conducted its “eInvoicing Adoption Survey” in the last quarter of 2009 and developed a benchmarking report to highlight the overall trends that are shaping the rapidly evolving AP automation space and to answer these questions.
The answer lies in execution. Our latest research indicates that the difference between a winning AP automation initiative and a dud comes down to the ability to execute such programs. Based on survey results, we have identified the secrets of successful invoice and payment management with a look into the best practices of the innovators. What techniques have they employed to streamline their processes? How do they monitor their programs? In short, what are they doing that you could be doing.
Increasing transactions processed on purchasing cards translates to a reduction in invoice volume - paper or otherwise - and the paperwork that is associated with invoices. Increased p-card volume also results in higher rebates for the buying organization.
Centralization of the receipt invoice process ensures that the AP department and senior management have instant visibility into the company’s outstanding liabilities. A formal policy mandating that all invoices should be sent to the AP department is the first step in streamlining invoice management processes.
Front-end imaging ensures that invoices enter the system quickly and are available to all the parties immediately, irrespective of where they are located. Combining imaging with automated data capture adds further benefits in terms of quicker entry of data and fewer errors.
An electronic invoicing solution goes a step further by applying a set of pre-defined validation rules to ensure that all the required information and only accurate information is submitted on the invoices, ensuring that only clean invoices enter the AP processing queues.
Leveraging an automated workflow solution ensures that once invoices enter the solution, they will be routed to the required approver automatically, based on pre-defined business rules. The business logic is typically configured at the time of solution implementation and can be updated as needed.
Organizations that do not have the in-house resources and capital required to bring a critical mass of suppliers onboard an automation solution are leveraging the expertise and value-added services provided by their technology vendors to achieve this.
Further, not all suppliers have the same technical savvy and propensity to adopt an e-invoicing solution. Providing multiple options for electronic invoicing - EDI integration, PO flip, Web templates etc. - goes a long way in ensuring that there is something for every supplier.
Dynamic discounting and supply chain finance have become hot topics in electronic invoicing circles. Organizations that are on the innovative end of the automation cycle are adopting these sophisticated technologies to increase their potential for discount capture.
2009 proved that one thing is clear about accounts payable — the future of AP rests with technology. Why?
Companies are looking to their operating departments to cut costs, and they see that with the right automation tools, AP can dramatically lower invoice processing costs, reduce erroneous payments, and capture more discounts. In our conversations with literally hundreds of controllers and AP managers in 2009, one theme rose above the rest: how can technology help us improve our finance operation?
Despite widespread and clear desire for improvement, confusion about automation options continues to plague finance managers.PayStream’s analysts believe the trick is sorting out the AP automation landscape.
What technology is available and which tools are the most effective?
How can AP best use these tools?
How do we get started?
1. Start with the correct data. Keying everything that comes in off of invoices would be a great start, but what if you have the wrong information on the invoice, or if the information was captured incorrectly at the point of entry?
For example, an invoice that comes in from an electronic portal may be incorrect. That’s why it’s important to get the proper information off of the invoices. For OCR, (what we are now correctly calling “intelligent document recognition” or IDR) getting the exact data you need is not that easy. But it is absolutely critical, because the next step—workflow routing and matching—requires the proper information in order to work correctly.
One common trap:the difference between header capture and line-item capture can mean the difference between a high-touch process and a touchless one.
2. All workflow is not the same. Workflow is an amorphous cloud and many project overruns are the result of not properly estimating what it’s going to take to change the business process.
What we found working with Phillip Morris and the Visiting Nurse Services of NY was that you need to go through a design process and figure out what you want the workflow system to do before you make a vendor or solution decision.
You can train the technology to do pretty much anything you want, so how do you want it to work?
Invoice approval routing is not the same as automated processing. For example, if invoices are being received at field offices and locations today, how are you going to manage routing once receipt is centralized at a PO Box controlled by AP?
While your staff knows internally where to route a specific supplier invoice for approval, this is usually based on the wealth of organizational knowledge. We call this collective understanding “tribal knowledge” which encompasses the 7-10 years average years of experience that your team members possess.
Once you centralize receipt, you will have to train your suppliers to put the person’s name or department name on the invoice so it can automatically be routed to the correct person. This is a business change that a lot of people don’t think about when moving to automation.
In order to succeed, AP needs to stop doing manual rework. Your team has become expert at working with imperfect data, and ePayables automation is not as forgiving. Capture, matching, and business logic requires powerful software. In summary, you need to design your business process around using the technology and automation in a way that makes sense for future digital AP, not for the way you are doing it today. (Click here to download PayStream’s report on imaging and workflow automation.)
3. Solid foundations are built on a well-designed business case. According to PayStream’s study of innovation in AP, the most successful business cases that make it over the hurdle when competing with other initiatives are those that are built on a broad business case foundation.
AP efficiency is only a third of the story.This means you need to get other individuals and business units inside of your company to buy into what you want to do.
The problem that many of us face is that AP is just one small (and frequently overlooked) business unit.For instance, other business units, many of whom have customers, might have a little more leverage when it comes to getting IT resources to help with projects or management buy-in when it comes to funding. Admittedly, AP is not the first in line when there’s a fight in the CFO suite about which projects they are going to spend money on.
The Case of the Lost Opportunity:
One of our clients (a large hospital) received approval for an AP ePayables project only to find out a short time later that the assistant controller decided to reallocate the funds to another project. When we did an analysis of the business case model, we found that the AP manager had only included about 24 percent of the actual residual benefit to automation. He missed a huge chunk of opportunity related to cash management and purchasing savings.
The first source of ROI is easy: AP efficiency.For example, reducing staff and speeding up the process will account for anywhere from 25 to 35 percent of the opportunity.
The remaining percentage comes from spend visibility—how money is being spent and the timing of that spend—which will help Procurement rationalize overall spend.
The next piece is working capital authorization. Having better visibility to the spend can allow you, for instance, to take advantage of paying some suppliers early in exchange for a discount. It’s similar to using a p-card to get a rebate from your bank. Paying your suppliers early in exchange for a 1½ or 2 percent discount is a quick way to make fast money for your automation efforts.
Having a broad foundation to your business case means bringing in other business units, and working with your counterparts, including Treasury, Procurement, and Finance. Even better: more stakeholders to push for your project.
Summary
In order to succeed in 2010, you need to paint a picture of your vision for the future of AP.Start with a picture of where you’re trying to go with your automation.
The vision is not that you’re going to use OCR/IDR or set up an electronic invoice portal, but rather that you want to move to a touchless process in AP.
Management can equate a touchless process with reduced labor costs and increased visibility into the number of invoices and accruals. The biggest hurdle involves convincing the people who need to approve your efforts, and they won’t necessarily understand the technology, so you need to simplify the future vision for them with simple goals and a visual map.
Technological advances have shrunk our world into a single, global marketplace. Tools like the Internet, email, video conferencing etc. have made it easy for organizations to connect with their customers and suppliers, whether they are across the street or across the ocean. However, these same factors that are responsible for expanding a company’s geographic footprint have resulted in an increase in international travel and the costs associated with this. Over the last few years, increase in the amount of business travel combined with escalating travel costs have significantly increased spending on corporate travel and entertainment expenses, making the second largest cost pool for most organizations, just behind salaries and benefits.
However, with the economy in a recession, companies are taking a hard look at these costs and investigating ways to control them. It is no surprise therefore that more than a third of the companies (38 percent) that participated in PayStream’s “T&E Expense Management Adoption” survey stated that they have decreased their T&E spend over the last three years.
Manual T&E Processes are Fraught with Challenges
There are complexities inherent to managing any paper-based process and the survey revealed that travel & expense is no exception. The biggest challenge for almost half the organizations (45 percent) was manual data entry and inefficient processes. More than a third of the respondents (35 percent) mentioned that lack of visibility into spend was a problem they faced. An equal number found inability to enforce corporate travel policies to be a challenge. High cost of processing expense reports was a challenge for a little less than a quarter of the organizations surveyed.
Challenges With Manual T&E Processes
Time is Ripe for Automation
Our research reveals that, owing to the emphasis on decreasing travel-related spend and the existing challenges faced in the travel management process, organizations are actively seeking automation options to help them streamline the expense management process and reduce its associated costs.
Analyzing Processing Costs
Based on survey results, the average cost to process a single expense report, across all companies surveyed, was $14.63. What was interesting to note was the relation between processing costs and the extent of automation an organization had in place. It is obvious from Table 1 that automation drives down processing costs. On average, a company spent approximately $28.21 to process an expense report if the process was entirely manual. This was four times as much as the processing costs accrued by companies that have automation in place. Organizations that have some automation in place have been successful in driving down processing costs per transaction to $7.42, whereas companies that are fully automated and using an integrated system have costs a per transaction cost as low as $6.19.
The direct relation between lower processing costs and automation also bodes well for companies that are shying away from automation because they believe that current processes work or that there is no ROI to be achieved from automation. This should make such companies take a second look at the range of options available in the T&E automation space today.
PayStream T&E Expense Management Adoption Survey Report PayStream Advisors conducted its “T&E Expense Management Adoption Survey” in the third quarter of 2009 and developed a benchmarking report to highlight the overall trends that are shaping this rapidly evolving space. The complimentary report can be downloaded here.
This survey report is designed to:
Help accounting and finance practitioners familiarize themselves with the TEM landscape,
Enable them to better understand the extent of adoption of the various forms of TEM automation, and
Allow companies to benchmark their operations against similar businesses.
Of the two opening sessions on the first day of PayStream ePayables Summit ’09, I chose to attend “Implementing e-Invoicing to Drive Continuous Process Improvement” from Motorola by Michael Riggins. As a consultant, I had strong penchant to comprehend and improve business processes on the front end of P2P operations before I stretched my foot into to e-Payments.
As a perfect start for that morning, I had all the ingredients I wanted for my breakfast on the agenda. I was interested in understanding the compelling company dynamics to move and adapt to new technologies in the Shared Services Division. To my thought, Riggins explained that the historic stats revealed that managing age old processes involving manual interventions had potential drawbacks. May it be inefficiency in processing invoices, time delays in processing invoices, higher number of exceptions, visibility into cash, and delays in reporting structure (to name a few) – it all led to a distorted cash management. Motorola initially tried “centralizing their AP processes” and “outsourcing their manual processes in matching PO-Invoice to low cost countries thus taking advantage of salary arbitrage.” However for a company the size of Motorola, they guesstimated that the cost per transaction was distinctly higher to what it could be by implementing electronic invoicing.
During the course of the session, I learned that this is more than a technical change that any company has to undergo to gain potential long term efficiencies and profits. It involves changes in culture, process, and people and more importantly the long term vision and buy-in from the leadership team of Shared Services Division. I was impressed by how companies are motivated to work together with supplier networks to gain the profits and not just shift the responsibilities to the outsourced vendors. Motorola not only executed their best practices and realized quick benefits but also envisions extending their best practices globally. For companies concentrating on cost cutting measures, I believe re-engineering their business process in the P2P domain accelerates their business processes- especially in clearing payments, gain potential discounts and provides better visibility and control over the cash enabling timely decisions.
In the current recessionary economic environment, organizations have intensified their focus on improving their bottom line by reducing costs and transforming their labor-intensive, paper-based procurement and accounts payable processes into automated ones. P-Cards are perhaps the only solution that effectively streamlines both ends of the procure-to-pay cycle (P2P), while significantly reducing costs and introducing greater levels of control and visibility into spend.
PayStream conducted its annual “Electronic Payments and P-Card Benchmark” research in the first half 2009, to collect data from over 500 enterprises. In current recessionary times, it was no surprise that the enterprises participating in our benchmark survey cited the need to reduce P2P transactions costs (65%) and need to maximize rebates and incentives from card-issuing bank as the main drivers to leverage P-Cards in their organization. Research found that P-Cards Deliver on their P2P Promise!
Figure 1: P-Cards Deliver on their P2P promise!
As displayed in Figure 1, P-Cards have sliced the cost of a single P2P transaction by nearly half. Additionally, P-Cards, on average, lower the P2P cycle times by one-third. In addition to streamlining the P2P cycle, P-Card provides the additional benefit of incentives or rewards (cash backs etc.) from the card-issuing bank. 46% of the organizations participating in PayStream’s research received an incentive varying from 0.5% to 2.0%.
PayStream research also found that even though P-Cards have been in existence for more than a decade, they capture, on average, only 9.3% of the enterprise indirect spend. Significant barriers to adoption of P-Cards exist! PayStream’s benchmark report titled, “Electronic Payments and P-Card Benchmark Survey Report: Bottom Line Savings from Procurement to Finance,” will cover different electronic payment methods, including ACH & P-Cards, focusing on how organizations can overcome their P-Card challenges to realize significant cost saving in their procurement and accounts payable departments. This report shall publish on September 01, 2009.
PayStream will further discuss the findings of the research in its annual summit in Charlotte from September 23rd-25th, 2009. More about PayStream Summit HERE.
Electronic invoicing solutions are finally delivering – at least partially – on the promise of the long-touted, but rarely experienced, paperless office.
For a number of reasons, including data security fears and a lack of technology investment, the accounts payable function has been dragged into the electronic age kicking and screaming. And that has been unfortunate, since it’s an area that can benefit substantially from automating its many time-consuming manual tasks and processes.
With the budget crunch of recent years and the ever-increasing pressure to do more with less, however, AP managers have begun to see the light and realize electronic invoicing and payments can improve productivity, efficiency, and cash flow.
Newer applications that provide virtual venues for exchanges among buyers, suppliers, banks, and other partners can dramatically shorten the invoice-to-pay cycle. Many of these solutions offer online dispute resolution and automatic invoice routing for initial and backup approvals, thus eliminating delays caused when paper invoices are misplaced or signers are out of the office.
The bottom line is that electronic invoicing and payment applications give users the opportunity to manipulate cash flow in a very positive way, especially when they provide discounting capabilities. Sometimes known as Dynamic Payables Discounting (DPD) or Supply Chain Finance (SCF), this electronic payment trend can be a real boon to day-to-day liquidity. Need your money more quickly? Offer your buyers an incentive discount for earlier payment, with a percentage that decreases as the original due date approaches. (Not to be outdone, savvy buying organizations have also begun to take advantage of this capability and proactively propose their own discounts to suppliers.)
Given the benefits, we think it hardly surprising that 48 percent of the 300+ AP and procurement professionals we surveyed late last year identified increasing electronic invoicing as a top priority for 2009.
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: Reduction in labor, material and postage costs are common with all e-invoicing solutions. Our research reveals that suppliers who adopt electronic invoicing can slash their invoice management costs by more than 50 percent.
Error Reduction: Validation rules configured into e-invoices solutions flag errors at the time of submission itself and prompt suppliers to correct them, reducing the number of exception invoices downstream.
Faster Settlement: Electronic invoicing compresses the invoice processing and approval cycle on the buyer side. This, combined with electronic payments, will ensure that suppliers are paid on time, or even early in some cases.
Improved Visibility: Suppliers have real-time access to invoices and payment status from a standard Web browser, reducing the number of calls and emails to AP Help Desks.
Better Cashflow Forecasting: Automating invoice processing and payments reduces the uncertainties around payments. Consistency around payment timing means that suppliers have enhanced ability to perform cashflow forecasting.
No More Reprint Requests: Electronic invoicing solutions drastically reduce the number of lost and missing invoices, which means that reprint requests from buyers will virtually be zero.
Quicker Dispute Resolution: Suppliers now have the ability to view disputed invoices at any given time and provide supporting/backup documentation, as needed, making dispute resolution a collaborative process as well as accelerating resolution.
Decrease Days Sales Outstanding: Dynamic discounting and supply chain finance capabilities available as part of e-invoicing solutions allow suppliers to decrease days sales outstanding (DSO) without adversely affecting customer relations.
Access to Cheaper Capital: Dynamic discounting delivers financing at more attractive rates to suppliers than factoring or asset based lending.
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