The tide is turning in the way government organisations are accepting and distributing invoices. Internationally, electronic invoicing or e-invoicing is gaining momentum with governments in Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Italy making it mandatory by law for organisations supplying goods and services to their departments to dump paper-based invoicing for electronic, automated processes.
While electronic invoicing services in Australia, like the US, have been slow to take off, there are huge opportunities for government agencies to take charge and build this trend locally.
On the face of it, electronic invoice data entry sounds pretty self explanatory. Take a paper invoice from a supplier, scan it and run an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) program on it and pass the results along to accounts payable’s software.
If you have some workflow processes to tie it all together, so much the better. It is also almost just as easy to create an electronic image of an invoice – basic scanning hardware and software are cheap and so are tools that can quickly turn a Word document into a PDF!
To many Local Governments, manual processes like these seem to be a good idea. But these manual processes can create as many problems as they solve.
Paper invoices are expensive to manage and store and the handling time alone, incurs huge costs across the thousands of invoices that need to be processed every year. Paper-based invoices are also highly prone to error. Even the very best scanning software creates errors that people find hard to pick up.
For the invoice data entry to be truly effective, it needs 100 per cent accuracy, not just something close to it.
While e-invoicing can mean different things to different people, generally within the finance industry, e-invoicing usually refers to sending and receiving invoice data in fully electronic format from end to end.
With this definition, e-invoicing software turns the entire accounts payable process electronic; from receiving invoices, getting approvals, making payments and archiving paid invoices and related documents. With e-invoicing software, local councils and government departments can achieve the following.
Work smarter
Scanning incoming paper invoices or manually entering data from incoming documents to the organisation’s system is dull, repetitive work yet vital to the day to day operations of any Local Government . For organisations paying as little as 100 invoices a week, an automated e-invoicing solution is useful to ensure that your time, money and resources are spent efficiently.
Cut down on errors
Too often, mistakes occur in the invoice approval and payment process and fixing payment errors can be just as costly and also tarnish your council’s reputation with suppliers. With an e-invoicing solution, less people need to handle the invoice that in turn, reduces the potential for data to be lost in transaction. Also, paying recurring invoices such as office supplies or mobile phone contracts is even easier as invoices are automatically attached with existing rules, contracts and payment schedules.
Provide a visible document trail for auditing purposes
E-invoicing solutions provide a searchable archive of all invoices that pass through the system which is particularly useful for auditing. It also offers greater transparency and a great tool for preventing accounting fraud.
Reduce the need for paper
With climate change high on the public’s agenda, organisations are increasingly developing an environmental conscience.
E-invoicing gets rid of paper and also, the physical amount of space that boxes of invoices can take up in the office.
Basware, an e-invoicing pioneer with more than a decade’s experience working with organisations – both public and private – delivers all the features of full invoice automation. A market leader around the world, Basware knows what really needs to happen for e-invoicing to deliver the benefits it’s really capable of.
Basware is the global leader in purchase to pay solutions with more than 1500 customers and one million users in over 50 countries around the world. Basware solutions automate business critical financial processes and deliver value by providing compliance and control, as well as fast return on investment. The solutions are distributed and implemented in Europe, the US, and Asia-Pacific through an extensive network of Basware offices and business partners.
To contact Basware go to www.basware.com.au, email info.au@basware.com or phone (02) 8622 5850.
*Copy supplied by Basware Pty Ltd
