Invoice processing is vital in any business, whether B2B or B2C. If you mismanage invoice processing, you may cause significant harm to the functionality and growth of your organisation. If the amount on the invoice is incorrect, you may end up having low customer satisfaction scores. This is detrimental because the customers may start moving to places where they feel valued.

Many vital metrics like the number of invoices you handle every month, the time it takes you to process them, the number of employees involved, among others, play an essential role in ensuring the business operations are streamlined. However, as the saying goes, many cooks spoil the broth. Having many people offer invoice processing services can become an inconvenience swiftly.

This is where the Invoice processing service companies come in. They are specialised companies that deal solely with invoice processing. They ensure that your invoices are processed on time and payments are made swiftly. This ensures that your brand recognition remains high within the vendors and suppliers. If you do the invoice processing yourself, you need a firm grip and utmost care.

The Challenges of Invoice Processing

In most cases, businesses opt to outsource their invoice processing needs because of the challenges of invoice processing that require skills and may be hard to deal with. Below are the main challenges you could likely face with invoice processing and why you should also allow an invoice processing service to handle all your invoice processing needs.

Dealing with Invoice Receipts

With preparing invoices, the most used method is paper. It, therefore, plays a vital role in bringing the entire process to a halt. This is because the paper invoices must be received, verified, and scanned before any approval can begin.

The invoices are also received from various sources like emails, buyers, or suppliers. Hence, they must be centralised before processing, resulting in a waste of time and space. Enlist invoice processing to avoid all the headaches associated with receiving and preparing the invoices for processing.

Data Entry in varying Formats

Handling the entries when processing the invoices makes the process tiresome. Even when the invoices are scanned or emailed as PDFs, they still need to be converted into usable formats. Invoice processing services like Oworkers.com have complex and intelligent software to convert the files into the required formats.

Invoice management

Invoices are handled in different steps, which are vital in invoice processing. It usually needs about 2-4 days to process and another 2-3 approvals for the invoice processing. The invoice enters the system, proceeds to ERP, and then moves to AP. The final step involves sending the invoice for approvals and payments. Many procedures can cause errors. Therefore, leaving invoice processing to an outsourced company is the best way to ensure that your invoices are processed in time, and you can pay the suppliers or vendors in a timely fashion.

What Do Invoice Processing Services Offer?

Traditionally, invoice processing has been a manually intensive procedure, and unless kept under check, it could significantly affect a business’s bottom lines. Organisations spend a lot of money per year to respond to supplier queries, match orders to purchases, and address processing defects. By hiring invoice processing services, you can bypass these challenges with invoice processing. The outsourcing companies offer services like:

• Matching the purchase orders and invoices
• Validating invoice data like code usage values, among others
• Transaction logging
• Extraction of the relevant data from the header and line items
• Scanning paper invoices
• Checking cash handling
• Receipt and e-Invoice creation
• Creating PO receipts for the supplier invoices

How Outsourcing Agencies Handle Invoice Processing

Invoice processing services employ highly qualified staff to process your invoices and ensure you can pay the suppliers on time. With their knowledge and experience, they can fine-tune a streamlined, thorough invoice processing process. The process involves the following steps:

Receiving The Invoices

The invoice processing service receives the invoices (Scanned, physical or digital copies). They then check the data to ensure it is correct and accurate. Because of the technologies most of them use, they support multiple file formats, providing you never face any issue.

Invoice Processing

Upon receiving the invoice, the staff in the invoice processing service check for the completeness and accuracy of the contents. They sort the invoices based on their complexity and their quality control procedures. If in any doubt, the service checks and verifies the invoice accuracy after considering your suggestions. These agencies have SMART software systems that use intelligent features such as pattern and character recognition to help standardise the processing.

Report Generation

After the invoices are analysed, the invoice processing service generates various reports based on the invoices. These reports are crucial in the decision-making and can help steer the organisation in the right direction. They are vital in record keeping and filing because a report can aggregate several invoices into a category.

The Invoices Sent

After thoroughly checking the invoices, the service then forwards the reports to you or imports them to an accounts payable system of your choice and in a format that you are comfortable with. They streamline the entire process to guarantee payments within no time after delivery of a product. Therefore, you can create a cordial relationship with your vendors or suppliers.

Why Outsource invoice processing?

Real-Time Services

Hiring an invoice processing service gives you real-time information regarding critical details about your transactions. It lets you decide on what information is vital when dealing with supplier payments.

Time-Saving Automated Process

The professionals providing outsourcing invoice processing services use the best ways of processing and analysing the business receipts, saving you time and money from such a mundane task.

Better Focus On The Core Business

Although outsourcing has many benefits, focusing on the core or essential business activities is critical. By enlisting an invoice processing service, you can deal with the core purpose of your business instead of dealing with invoice processing. This boosts your business growth by minimising invoice processing errors and enhancing productivity.

Comprehensive Reports

After processing your invoices, the outsourced company gives you several exhaustive reports on the processed invoices and their status at a suitable frequency. If needed, they can even configure their software to be providing you with real-time updates.

Reduced Errors

By hiring an invoice processing service, you can remain confident that there will be minimal errors because professionals will handle the invoice processing. These companies use modern infrastructure and technology to cut costs and save processing time. They use ICR and OCR technologies to capture data like Vendor ID, date, total amounts, and line items accurately.

Conclusion

Invoice processing can make or break your business. Therefore, you need to handle the process delicately. Better yet, leave it to an outsourced invoice processing service to enjoy the many benefits that come with it. There are many challenges to processing your invoice, as shown above, and an equally high number of reasons to outsource your invoice processing.