4 Reasons to Achieve Real-Time Invoice Visibility

Think about how your organization’s finance department organizes and processes invoices. Do you know where invoices are within the process, where any processes are blocked, and where liabilities may develop?

Many won’t know, as invoice visibility continues to be a common pain point, due to widespread manual processes. This lack of visibility into payment status can cause problems across the organization, such as:

• Increasing AP resources needed to respond to supplier queries
• Impairing Treasury’s ability to forecast
• Reducing R2R’s ability to identify liabilities and close the books

Besides overcoming the above issues, here are 4 reasons to achieve real-time invoice visibility:

1. Global Transparency

As more and more businesses are expanding worldwide, digitizing AP is the best way to provide greater control and transparency over spending. With increased invoice visibility, organizations can ensure that spending across the organization follows the same policies and procedures and that they have an accurate view of spend globally. When invoice data and images are available to all users in one system, regardless of an employee’s location, organizations have instant access to information so users can quickly take action if issues arise. The real-time analytics and consistent reporting that is possible with digitization also make it possible for organizations to identify slow points in the process and introduce continuous improvements which can deliver significant savings, especially for organizations that work on a global scale.

2. Resource Flexibility

Another benefit of the real-time visibility provided with digitized processes is that businesses are able to “lift and shift” work, ensuring that proper resources are being dedicated according to workload. This type of resource flexibility is a key requirement for building efficient shared services centers. With a fully digitized invoice process, AP analysts have everything they need at their fingertips (amount to be paid, taxes, audit trail, invoice images and more), so they can easily and accurately handle invoices from different global locations in a central location. In addition, workers can be quickly reassigned to critical tasks when there are seasonal or other fluctuations in the business. Consequently, organizations do not have to hire temporary staff or use outsourced providers to keep invoices flowing through the organization. They can maintain a high degree of speed and accuracy at all times, and ensure invoices are processed correctly the first time.

3. Improved Compliance

Increased visibility into the invoice approval process reduces risk to the organization on both a local and global scale. For a global organization, international rules and regulations, add complexity to invoice processing, but digitized processes ensure that there is always centralized corporate control. While solutions must be able to accommodate some flexibility to accommodate the statutory, regulatory and cultural issues faced in different countries, global organizations realize the greatest benefit from digitization when they achieve a high degree of process standardization. Digitization also ensures that there is a complete digital audit trail of invoice processing, so it becomes easy to demonstrate that invoices were properly routed for tax approval or exception handling, and that corporate controls and local regulations are followed at each step.

It’s also important for organizations to implement and monitor the right benchmarks to get the business results required to succeed. It is only with digitization that an organization can define KPIs for every step along the invoice journey, helping to quickly identify non-compliant processes, enabling continuous enhancement and leading to improved cycle time.

4. Improved Cycle Time

Improving the cycle time of invoice processing is one of the most important things the organization can do to improve the quality of service delivery in P2P. Automating AP to convert all incoming invoices into an electronic format will speed performance, reduce errors, reduce paper, and provide support for any corporate sustainability initiatives. Less time spent on manual invoice processing means more time for value-adding activities such as tracking where invoices are being held up or delayed. Shortened cycle time means greater control of cash flow and greater capture of supplier discounts.

For an even more improved cycle time, an action list allows for prioritization and processing from a single invoice list to ensure that the most pressing work is done first. Companies interested in achieving real-time invoice visibility should start by looking for a centralized solution that supports global shared services centers with minimal impact on critical business and IT resources. Don’t forget to consider whether the solution will be easy to upgrade and extend into the future. One example of such as solution is Dolphin’s Process Tracking System for Accounts Payable (PTS-AP). This solution provides users with greater control and global transparency into invoice processing and visibility by automating the capture of highly unstructured invoice information and automating approval and exception handling workflow to digitize the process from end-to-end and realize global transparency, improved flexibility, stronger compliance, and improved cycle time.

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The Future of Invoice Processing

The future of invoice processing is digital. Old, paper-based invoice processes are no longer acceptable. Users must have a real-time view of invoices so the organization has useable, fact-based information they need to make informed decisions and control spending. By digitizing the invoice process, organizations can control the way that invoices truly flow through the organization, increasing the speed, accuracy and transparency of the entire process. When developing a roadmap for future process improvement, ensure that you keep the four reasons for achieving real-time invoice visibility outlined here in mind. If your future process is digitized you will be able to gain the necessary insight into the invoice process to achieve these benefits and accelerate future innovation and business growth.