Why the future is bright for businesses using e-invoicing
“Being able to send invoices electronically, straight into my customer’s system, has reassured me that I will get paid in a timely manner. While I value the free invoices I received when I joined Tungsten Network, I see that investing in this service is a must for my business, where minimising stress and maximising time are always priorities.”Sue Tappenden, owner of People Work (Consulting) Ltd.
Companies around the world are seeking to address competitive pressures with cost effectiveness and improved transparency into their financial performance. One of the fastest growing ways to achieve this real-time visibility is the adoption of Electronic Invoicing.
Electronic invoicing (or e-Invoicing) completely removes paper from the invoice process to enable straight-through processing. It replaces traditional forms of invoicing, such as PDF, and in doing so make the accounts payable process considerably smoother and more effective, which in turn enables an organisation to comprehensively assess its cash flow and liabilities to its suppliers.
E-invoicing eliminates a lot of the issues associated with the handling of paper or PDF invoices, which can be extremely time consuming and require opening, scanning, sending to the correct department, filing, archiving and more. By making the process electronic, and eliminating the physical handling that traditional – and frankly, archaic – forms of invoicing require, the possibility of human error is significantly diminished. E-Invoicing even allows data from the supplier’s accounting system to be directly transmitted to their customer’s accounting system.
Anna Gburczyk, Business Transformation Manager at Orange Business Services, notes that the transition to e-invoicing is a necessity for all businesses today, and that the collection of data rather than paper has allowed for improvements in all areas of Orange’s business network.
Compliance is another massive issue for companies globally, and a major benefit of e-Invoicing is its ability to eliminate undistinguishable audit trails. In today’s world it’s essential that companies ensure they’re not being defrauded and can obtain a clear and concise audit trail. E-Invoicing enables the creation of an electronic trail, speeding up dispute resolution and making auditing less laborious and costly. Furthermore, this end to end view of the invoicing process allows for full transparency. Suppliers can see exactly when their invoice has been approved, processed and paid, providing invaluable peace of mind. And e-invoicing means companies are no longer susceptible to PDF malware (a type of virus), which can give corrupt sources access to a network and potentially gather highly confidential and sensitive information. Targeted malware attacks have been on the rise year-over-year and business sectors have been identified as the most likely to be targeted.
E-Invoicing has long been proving its cost and process efficiencies to forward thinking businesses. It delivers several invaluable benefits, not only to large enterprises but also to SMEs, who consequently have access to a wider market of potential customers and suppliers, and have the peace of mind of knowing that they are going to get paid on time. It’s becoming more and more likely that, in the future, ALL businesses will adopt e-Invoicing.
