How Much Can a Small-to-Midsize Businesses Really Benefit from Invoice Management Automation?
How many suppliers does your accounts payable (AP) department pay? Have you checked recently how many checks your AP department has written in the past year? Have you ever totaled up how much time and effort goes into this lower-value process each year – or estimated the cost of this effort to your small business?
The numbers might surprise you – if you’re a small to midsize business (SMB) still using a manual (or partially manual) AP process.
According to AMI-Partners, the typical SMB works with 190 suppliers and vendors. If you write those vendors just one check a month, that’s 2,280 checks annually. No wonder 42% of SMBs surveyed say they’ve experienced errors reconciling invoice. And on average, accounting and finance staff spend 14% of their time each week processing invoices.
Drivers of change
As your business grows, expect to work with larger ecosystems of partners and suppliers that will increase AP workloads – and costs – exponentially. Are you prepared to hire more people to support this non-core process?
Unless you automate, you might not have a choice. And the benefits of automation address other drivers of change as well. For example, to compete, SMBs are being compelled to align their invoice process with the larger goals of reducing expenses, increasing efficiency, improving productivity, and even digitally transforming parts of the business. This will require eliminating manual processes, which are inherently cumbersome, inefficient, and laborious.
Manual AP processes also make it difficult to monitor spending trends and behaviors and detect potential mistakes or fraud – which ultimately leads to cash flow problems. For SMBs, cash flow is everything. Visibility into cash flow is essential to operationalizing a payment strategy in which bills are paid on time, payment rebates are used to free up more working capital, and you improve your company’s purchasing power.
Real benefits through AP efficiency and transparency
Savvy SMBs are tackling these AP challenges by deploying cloud software applications that automate invoice management. AMI-Partners also found that SMBs are achieving significant cost reductions with automated spending solutions:
- US$34,000 – Average annual savings with automated invoicing solutions
- $11 – Average savings per invoice after implementing an invoicing solution
Explore the benefits for your business – with Concur Invoice
With the Concur Invoice solution, you can eliminate manual, inefficient AP processes taking too much time, costing too much money, and keeping you in the dark about how much you’re spending and where it’s going. We provide a clear path to fully centralized, near-real-time employee spend data, giving you the unparalleled visibility, agility, and control needed to manage and grow your business with more intelligence. You can even predict and proactively manage spending, redirecting it to align with your strategic priorities.
Our customers typically realize $39,000 in annual savings using Concur Invoice. But every business is different – so to help you quantify the potential benefits of Concur Invoice for your finance department, we’ve created an ROI tool for Concur Invoice. In just a few minutes, you’ll have a sense of the ROI you can expect. Calculate your ROI today!
