01 May 2012 SciQuest offers a one-stop-shop for AP automation
SciQuest last week announced a new Accounts Payable offering as part of its “source-to-settle” solution suite. The new product features expanded functionality for automating accounts payable, “eliminating manual processes and providing powerful insight for finance and procurement staff.”
I spoke to Max Leisten at Sciquest to understand a bit more about the new string to their source to settle bow.
SciQuest are best known in the Higher Education and Life Sciences particularly in the United States. Their reputation for strong supplier enablement capability and 1st class customer satisfaction is well deserved. Although SciQuest have had an e-invoicing offering for a number of years they wanted to offer a truly comprehensive solution that would address the entire payables process. “It’s easy to aim for the 80% of invoices from 20% of your suppliers but that still leaves you with a lot of paper.” Max told me. “We asked ourselves the question: What would best in class look like?”
SciQuest claim that traditional accounts payable processes for most organizations are riddled with inefficiencies, including manual data entry, lengthy approval processes, invoice exceptions and missing invoices. Their new offering, SciQuest Accounts Payable, aims to remove these manual processes for receiving, managing and paying invoices, and to push the costs and time-intensive tasks out of the purchasing lifecycle.
It’s a great approach. The reality is that while electronic invoices are the ideal, there will always be a substantial proportion of invoices that will arrive on paper and by taking a hybrid approach – electronic for the high volume supplier and OCR for the rest – it is realistic to aim for 100% automation in accounts payable. It’s a point that we’ve made again and again. Electronic invoicing isn’t the objective – automation is and now SciQuest is offering a one stop shop for AP automation.
