Intelligent Data Capture

A torrent of tweets amplified one another over the last few weeks about the apparent enormous current interest in e-invoicing in the United States. Apparently, 42% of companies – a sizable proportion by any standard – are evaluating their electronic invoicing options. They were all quoting from the very fine report published recently by PayStream Advisors’ e-invoicing Adoption Benchmarking Report. But unlike the many tweeps who were excited by this, I was a little underwhelmed and in my opinion, there was some much more interesting revelations in the report.

I once heard of an investment that was guaranteed to double my money. What wasn’t guaranteed however, was how long it would take to double!

Caveat Emptor

Purchasing Insight logoYou have to be very careful how you interpret claims made by vendors and claims made for the accuracy of a scanning based document management solution process are no exception. If you want to include scanning of invoices as a component of an AP automation program you need to know that you are likely to in excess of 80% 1st time match. But what does 80% accuracy mean?

Purchasing Insight logoWe all know that manual processes are inefficient. We all know that the use of paper based business processes is increasingly becoming an anachronism in the 21st century and we all know that AP automation is a good idea. But have you ever stopped to consider how much money is being wasted by not taking action?

AP automation has got a bad name for itself in some quarters. You will often hear of projects that meant well but either failed to meet expectations or were abandoned completely. There are many reasons why projects fail such as poor change management or lack of sufficient resource but for AP automation projects, there are three particular issues that crop up again and again in failed or disappointing projects.