Arming Your Organization With An Einvoice Solution: Your Comprehensive Guide
What Is An Invoice
For finance teams tasked with the order-to-cash process, achieving full control of their accounts receivable is key goal. As backbone of the business operations, accounts receivable must be managed accurately to ensure smooth throughputs and ensure customersatisfaction. To maximize revenue and keep both your external and internal invoices up to date, you will need to leverage an e-invoicing solution.
An electronic invoicing system is an innovative and powerful tool for managing and controlling every aspect of the order-to-cash process. By converting paper invoices into digital documents and streamlining invoice approval, tracking, and managing, e-invoicing facilitates paperless, error-free transactions. What?s more, with an all-in-one, centralized platform, companies can gain greater visibility into their accounts receivable and improve the effectiveness of their financial and administrative teams.
This comprehensive guide provides an overview of the value of implementing an e-invoicing solution, as well as step-by-step instructions on how to set and configure such solution in your organization.
Benefits of an e-Invoicing Solution
An e-invoicing system brings range of benefits to implementing companies and their customers. By using this approach, organizations can automate their invoice approval, approval and tracking processes. This saves the time and effort required for the manual processing invoices and the related paperwork.
By eliminating the need for personnel to manually enter, verify and approve invoices, it further reduces the risk of containing errors. e-Invoicing also eliminates the risk of ineffective communication, resulting from hard-to-read invoices, bottlenecks and delays. For example, in instances where direct payment is needed, the automated approach allows for single click payments to be made reducing costs and receiving payments quicker.
Another financial benefit is that an e-invoicing system cuts costs by eliminating paper and postage expenses. In addition, companies can utilize features such as workflow automation and on-demand reporting to quickly generate performance metrics, giving finance teams the data they need to effectively manage their accounts receivable.
Building An e-Invoicing Solution
The first step in setting up an e-invoicing solution is selecting the right package for your organization. Choose solution that is flexible, and can scale up as your needs change. Make sure that the system your chose is powerful enough to handle daily large volumes of invoices, as well as multiple file uploads.
The second step is to create workflow of the invoice processing process, from creation to payment. This should involve detailed mapping of the different steps and the specific actions that must be taken by each employee or department. Financial teams must ensure that all authoritative roles, such as that of the approver and finisher, are clearly defined.
Once you have configured your solution, it is time to begin onboarding your stakeholders, such as customers and suppliers. This involves setting up your system to be able to correctly identify the origin and destination of invoices. You should also provide each customer with their own login and account to ensure secure access to their documents.
Once all of your stakeholders are onboarded, you are ready to start testing the e-invoicing system. Test it with multiple invoices, to detect any bugs and errors. Make sure to have someone review the results to ensure accuracies.
Integrating e-Invoicing into Your Procedures
Finally, once your e-invoicing system is ready, it is time to begin integrating it into your existing processes. To do this, financial teams must draw up clear invoicing and payment protocols. These must include comprehensive rules and guidelines for the exchange of invoices and the payment process, as well as the document retention process.
Once these protocols have been established, the e-invoicing solution should be deployed and actively used. Financial teams should take the time to train users on the system, ensuring that everyone understands how to use the solution and is familiar with the processes and best practices.
The Benefits of e-Invoices
In the past, manual processing of invoices was tedious, time-consuming and full of errors. By implementing an e-invoicing system, finance teams can improve the efficiency and accuracy of their order to cash process. This helps to cut costs and maximize revenue, as well as to ensure customersatisfaction. By taking the time to build an e-invoicing solution for your business, you can reduce the risk of errors and ensure efficient processing of payments.
