Supplier Invoice Approval

EBC’s Supplier Invoice solutions can streamline your purchase invoice processes and eliminate the need for time-consuming and error-prone paper-based accounts payable methods.

Reducing the operational costs in any business is high on the Agenda within any organisation, and the manual processing of purchase invoices is in the top three. Inputting purchase invoice data into the accounting system, validating the data, authorising the invoice and then archiving a copy invoice are all extremely time-consuming when done manually. Delays in executing these processes can be even more costly for an organisation, often resulting in limited exposure to your liability that month or quarter and reduced supplier discounts and/or severe late payment penalties.

Major benefits for a business when implementing supplier invoice approval fall into the following categories:

1. Eliminate data entry errors
2. Reduce data entry costs by over 50%
3. Maximise settlement discounts
4. Minimise late payment penalties
5. Eliminate lost invoices
6. Improve cash flow
7. Re-deploy accounts payable staff to carry out more productive roles

Major benefits for the Financial Management Team that implements invoice approval cover the following:

1. Greater management control, monitoring, reporting, and Mi
2. Less in-house resource required
3. Increased capabilities to deliver more core services to the organisation
4. Significantly improved service quality and consistency
5. A single partner for the whole Scan print/output, delivering on a single Document Management Strategy

It consists of four simple stages that work in a continuous cycle.

1. Assess

Obtain a much greater understanding of your existing Invoice approval process and requirements. This phase requires an agreement to share financial data and engage key users and support staff, it is normally sponsored in the business by a senior executive stakeholder. The objective of this stage is to produce a jointly agreed Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for the current process environment. An assessment typically takes 1-3 weeks to complete. Confidence for both parties to contract is dependent upon the quality and level of information provided at the assessment stage.

2. Design

Focus on creating a solution around your lead finance application, your manual process and the software and support services that will meet your business and project objectives. This centres on rationalising the existing approval method, streamlining the workflow process for areas such as Invoice Register and capture. There may also be a need for additional services such as intelligent Invoice recognition or application integration.

The output of this phase is the production of a scope of work with the most appropriate solution.

3. Implement

Set up all of the relevant processes, agreements and technologies to meet the contracted requirements. This is driven by two key stages: Transition which focuses on changing the provision of existing manual method to the automated workflow service. Transformation which focuses on changing the process or technology used to deliver the solution with your users.

Supplier Invoice Approval will start to deliver service improvements and cost savings from day one, even though the phased implementation may take several months. Furthermore, we will ensure that you do not need to make any significant changes on day one in order to achieve this, mitigating any potential impact on the end users. Working within Prince2 methodology we ensure efficient deployment for your business and moving you forward into the optimised design.

4. Manage

This is the heart of the service, partnering with you to guarantee that your supplier Invoice approval receives ongoing management in the way that’s right for your business and ensuring that the service performance levels are maintained over the contract life. This phase consists of three key activities:

• Process Review : ensuring that the workflow management is optimised and the cost of the process is tracked and understood.
• Incident management: handling all requests in a professional and timely manner
• Account management: ensuring that new requirements and changes to existing requirements are properly defined, agreed and implemented

The partnership doesn’t end there. We will continue to work with you into the future to make sure that your Business Process Automation is always optimised, optimally running and optimally managed – as well as ensuring that the technologies you use are the right choice. To make this happen, we’ll carry out regular strategy reviews, deliver consultancy and have regular meetings to ensure that the services you receive meet any Service level agreements in place. So whenever your business changes, your business processes can change with you, as it adapts to deliver against your new demands.

EBC will maximize your cost savings and continually fine-tune your Invoice Approval solution for optimal productivity. Best of all, we can completely customize service offerings to your unique business needs.

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