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A significant amount of effort - and money - is spent by procurement organisations on spend analysis. It's a complete no brainer.  Without understanding what you spend, how can you begin to manage it. Knowledge is power. What gets measured gets managed. All true of course but how do you actually derive commercial benefit from spend analysis. In other words - "show me the money!"

One of the leading financial and business advisers, Grant Thornton Sweden, has deployed an invoice processing solution from enterprise purchase-to-pay specialist Palette as the backbone of its internal and hosted electronic invoice management (EIM) service. Grant Thornton Sweden is one of the leading financial and business advisers, providing services in Sweden and internationally. Currently processing around 30,000 invoices per month for over 300 customers both in Sweden and internationally, Grant Thornton’s EIM service improves the efficiency of customers’ accounts payable, as well as optimising the company’s own internal invoice management system.

When I want to read in bed, I press a button and a light goes on. When I want to fry an egg, I turn the dial on my stove and it gets hot. When I want to take a shower - I just do it. I don't have my own electricity generator  or my own natural gas source or a water purifying plant. Why would I? I just want the end product. So why do I have an IT department? We love the cloud. It frees up business to get better at business instead of getting better at IT. But as businesses become more enthusiastic to embrace and exploit the cloud it is becoming more evident that along with cloud computing comes a complex chain of accountability.

Purchase to Pay is crucial to making promised savings a reality. A great promised saving for a particular procurement category is worthless if you can't prevent people in your organization going off piste when it comes to purchasing. And a great supplier relationship will be ruined if your finance function pays late. ImageBecause you're reading this - you probably already know all about P2P. But do you really know what P2P is? Because depending on whether you see it from a finance point of view or a purchasing point of view you could have a very distorted view of what getting P2P right is all about. It's a bit like a police investigation. Three different witnesses to a crime can give three entirely different accounts of an incident - so much so that the police could be forgiven for thinking that there was three separate incidents. The witnesses are not stupid and they're not lying - they simply have different points of view. And its the same with P2P.

Purchase to Pay, P2P, Procurement Process, Purchasing Process and Dynamic DiscountingElectronic Invoicing - Choosing the Right Partner

Make no mistake - you're not buying a solution - you're buying into a partnership. Electronic invoicing has some major challenges: technical challenges; legal and tax challenges and commercial challenges. The success of an e-invoicing project is highly dependent on the success of your partnership with your e-invoicing provider. You could be working with them for a long time so your selection needs to be made with your eyes open. Here are ten of the most important selection criteria. In no particular order, they should help you to understand where to focus when selecting an electronic invoice partner.