Enspan.io | Building Collaborative Supply Chains

INVOICING RE-IMAGINED

Learn how to unlock millions of dollars in savings from your Accounts Payable process

We've completely overhauled and re-imagined the invoicing process and you'd be surprised at the opportunity we found.

We were sitting in the CFO's office of a $1BN company listening to his staff explain the challenges with the AP process and what they were planning to do about it when it struck us that today's invoicing process is anchored to a past where the only option for invoice data to get from supplier to buyer was via the creation of a paper (or .pdf) invoice.

Furthermore, the same invoice data was duplicated throughout the process by manual re-entry at various points in the timeline - driving significant cost and potential errors.

Then we asked a simple question: "Why wait for the supplier to send an invoice?"

Before we get to why that question drove out a powerful insight, let's quickly re-examine the challenges.

The problems with traditional invoicing:

SOLUTION

We see companies are either outsourcing or moving their AP departments to low-cost countries. Some are looking at image recognition and OCR technology to auto-read and recognize invoices. Some companies have gone as far as to create invoicing portals where suppliers need to re-enter the invoice (again) in order to get paid.

Each of these has their challenges. Today's invoicing process contains several opportunities for elongation as seen in the diagram below:

Enspan's auto-invoicing solution

Why wait for your supplier to send you an invoice if it's going to drive all of the above issues?

When companies use the Enspan API for recording receiving events (receipt of goods from a supplier) a powerful thing happens: The P.O. details (item and price) as well as the delivery note (line and quantity received) are recorded and made available to the buyer and the supplier using our secure, encrypted messaging protocol.

This allows us to create a pro-forma draft of the invoice on behalf of the supplier.

Because this invoice is created automatically using the data from the approved P.O. and the signed Delivery Note, it always makes a three-way match. 100% of the time.

The supplier simply approves the invoice from a web-page (or workflow email) and the customer auto-creates a payable in their ERP using our Invoice API. The supplier knows that the invoice is approved and they will get paid and they don't have to email or send a physical invoice.

Done. Both parties are winners. Zero data entry.

The key is to re-use all of the data from the P.O. and shipment to create the Delivery Note and the Invoice and no one has to touch a keyboard.

The elegance of this is that all three documents are now in one place: 100% compliant, available to both parties, and ready for audit.

Furthermore, there's no processing of paper documents, no image recognition, and OCR vendors to deal with. Additionally, your staff can remotely process this from anywhere on the planet - a critical option for the current COVID-19 times and the future.

Sample Business Case

We have developed a business case tool to help estimate benefits from using our technology. It is available on our site free of charge (access it by clicking on the image below).