Top 5 Essential Reasons For You To Automate Your Invoice Processing

Organizations are always on the lookout for ways to reduce costs and to improve the finance team’s efficiency. A paper-based process is quite tedious, and finance departments spend too much time in filing and maintaining. These are prone to mistakes like loss of information, fraudulent bills, tampered receipts, etc.

In this blog, we describe by leveraging the technology, how you could benefit from processing invoices automatically and improve the efficiency of your finance team.

Why is automated invoice processing required?

The turnaround time to process a single invoice might take from days to weeks. As a result of this, payment deadlines are missed, resulting in lost discounts or even fines and vendors become frustrated, creating in poor relationships.

Invoices may arrive from many sources, such as fax, couriers, and emails
Hard copies are validated and then gets entered into the accounting systems.
Finance team then finds the Purchase Order so that the invoice is matched, verified, approved and signed off for payment
If it exceeds the organization’s limited amount, it may have to go to the next approver for further verification.
If everything is correct, the invoice is input into the accounting system ready for payment.

What are the benefits of automated invoice processing?

The finance automation tool automatically captures all the invoice data and extracts critical information, thereby reducing the manual work. With e-Invoices, there’s less worry about maintaining physical copies, tampered, or fraudulent invoices that can jeopardize the financial objectives of the organization.

Extract your invoice data and pre-populate key information as and when the invoice is received.
Increase your payment turnaround which allows you to benefit from early payment discounts
No lost invoices or duplicate processing/payments
Custom notifications and approval flow to process invoices.
Get real-time and accurate reporting across multiple devices.
Seamless integration with other accounting software

Which is the best automation software to process invoices digitally?

Finance automation software can facilitate processing invoices digitally. The software would be capable of matching invoices against purchase orders and GRNs. You will be allowed to set up and customize an approval workflow as per the organizational terms that send out essential information about each transaction to the next approval authority. The status of all the processed purchase orders, invoices, pending payments, will be available in a single dashboard.

Finly is one such finance automation software that can not only processes invoices digitally but also helps in:

Cost Savings – With the entire trail being managed digitally, there is no need to maintain a massive stack of papers. The cost gets reduced significantly on buying stationery, no need for any storage room with cabinets.
Automated Accounting – Any business payment that gets processed, has to be recorded in your accounting software. The finance automation software automatically reconciles your accounts payable, with your existing accounting software so that the error-prone manual process of entering data gets eliminated in turn savings cost and time of the finance teams.
Three-Way Matching – Automate the process of matching invoices against purchase orders. Any purchase order raised through the system gets automatically mapped against the invoice, and GRN received. Multiple other data points such as the packing slip, payments & E-Way Bill are auto-mapped against the purchase order.
Paperless Storage – Not just invoices, with automation software, the finance team can also manage other business docs like purchase orders, invoices, and payments. Store all your record in the software and retrieve them at any instant with a single click of a button.
Audit Trails – Get the complete transaction details when purchase orders are processed. All the events are automatically recorded that occurs in the execution of any purchase order or payment transaction and get instant access to complete budget and spend details.
Comprehensive Reporting Structure – Finance automation software helps in creating a structured report of all the accounts payable in a single dashboard. CFOs can get a combined report on the various expenses that are occurring in their organization. Based on the report generated, they can plan their budget accordingly.
Avoid Fraudulent Errors: With an automated accounts payable system, you can minimize fraudulent money transfers, theft, or costly errors. Add additional security layers by scheduling a one-time set up of recurring payments, requiring more than one person to authorize a payment, email or SMS notifications for every transaction made, etc. will help reduce the risk factor involved in payments.

The benefits that CFOs can be seen after moving to FinlyFinance are the improved accounts payable, faster invoice processing time, streamlined processes, total control on budget spend, increased productivity, effective communication, and collaboration, faster invoice processing, and the minimized risks associated with routine invoice payments. This yields to a better relationship with vendors by allowing them for preferred service and better deals.