26 is a magic number

26 is a magic number

Today, another post from Richard Manson from CloudTrade

Let’s start at the beginning. What do we know about 26? Wikipedia – the font of all knowledge – tells me that 26 is ‘the natural number following 25 and preceding 27’. OK, I can go with this. That’s pretty accurate I guess.

But I know it is more than that. So what else?

Apparently a shape with 26 faces is a rhombicuboctahedron. But, hey, my 2 year old could have told me that… (Note to self, remember that for the next pub quiz).

It is the atomic number for Iron (also useful for the pub quiz).

But moving away from impressive ways to win £50 on a Thursday night…

What else do we know?

The 26th letter and the last letter of the English alphabet is Z. It is the length of a marathon (26 miles and 385 yards to be exact). The human foot and ankle has 26 bones. 26 is the total number of cases on the US version of Deal or No Deal.

….OK, I feel we are now slipping back to the realms of the pub quiz.

So we can see there are many interesting instances of the number 26. Yet the most important (in our eyes at least!) seems to be missing. And without wishing to question the accuracy of Wikipedia, I feel it my duty to reveal the most important, yet missing, reference.

Purchasing Insight logo26 minutes is how quickly CloudTrade onboarded a new supplier – from initial request via email (to a supplier we’ve never had contact with before) to the supplier actually submitting their first, live production invoice via CloudTrade.

Yes folks. 26 minutes.

It sounds too good to be true, and I can only think that is why Wikipedia have not already added it to their comprehensive list of facts.

Let’s take a look a bit deeper.

CloudTrade is different from other e-invoicing solutions, and the way we are different means we can onboard more suppliers, more quickly than anyone else. There are three key differentiators:

1) We don’t ask suppliers to change any of their processes – e-invoicing solutions require suppliers to send EDI or XML files which involves changes to their applications or infrastructure causing cost and time, and as a result all but the largest suppliers don’t do it… and when they do, you are talking months to get them live rather than minutes!

2) We don’t ask suppliers to raise their invoice twice – once in their own system and then again
in a 3rd party portal causing duplicate effort and cost

3) We don’t charge them for sending their invoice – a standard model for many e-invoicing solutions on the market and one we fundamentally disagree with.

CloudTrade doesn’t require the supplier to do anything differently and this is why we have such good onboarding rates – typically in excess of 90%. Suppliers can create their invoice using their current process. All they need to then do is generate a PDF invoice (which almost all accountancy packages can do) and email it to you. CloudTrade intermediates and maps the data directly from the PDF and populates your accounting package. There is no change or inconvenience to the supplier, and because the data is taken straight from the PDF we can also guarantee 100% data accuracy, so no checking, correcting or data input needed on your side.

On-boarding suppliers couldn’t be easier: we simply email the supplier asking them to send their next invoice to us as a PDF. And this is where the ubiquitous nature of PDF invoicing has allowed us to achieve what must surely be an onboarding world record – 26 minutes from the initial email requesting the supplier to follow the new process, to the supplier sending their invoice and being set up on CloudTrade.

So 26 really is a magic number.

Of course, according to De La Soul, 3 is the magic number….Well, that’s certainly something to aim for!

STOP PRESS!! Hang on, there’s more folks! We are very pleased to announce that 26 is now also the number of UK Public Sector organisations we are now working with. 26, a magic number indeed.

CloudTrade can be found on twitter @CloudeTradeNet



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