Empower AP – and Your Whole Business – with Intelligent Invoice Management
Every aspect of your business depends on your ability to manage cash flow. Yet, this continues to be one of the most challenging tasks faced by finance professionals. Even small businesses must often manage a huge number of payment transactions made by various employees across multiple categories. Outdated and inflexible processes make this hard, leaving accounts payable (AP) to scramble after lost invoices, manually enter paper invoice data, and waste time double-checking previous transactions. Not only do these manual processes slow things down and limit your overall spend visibility, but they can also result in financial errors and money lost on duplicate payments, missed discounts, and unchecked spend.
The solution? Intelligent invoice management.
With the right digital tools, AP can process invoices automatically and audit every invoice and payment. Then finance can perform detailed analytics on millions of transactions and use that data to identify important trends and spot fraud. The key is for finance and IT to find the right solution.
To make the choice easier, SAP commissioned IDC to interview* eight organisations across the United States and the United Kingdom using the Concur Invoice solution. These companies hail from a number of industries and range from small to large. Participants were asked to evaluate how Concur Invoice is impacting their AP, invoicing, and business travel operations, as well as core business and cost structures.
When asked why they chose Concur Invoice, the clear answer was to improve spend visibility, simplify finance, and reduce the risk of AP errors and fraud. On top of that, many participants cited a positive experience with other SAP Concur solutions – including the Concur Expense and Concur Travel solutions – making the addition of Concur Invoice the logical next-step.
When survey data was compiled and applied to the IDC business value model, the results were impressive. With Concur Invoice, participating companies are achieving average annual benefits of US$662,700 per organisation – that’s $3,258 per 1,000 invoices.
With Concur Invoice, companies get a digital invoice management solution that integrates with most ERP and accounting systems and connects with third-party solutions used by most vendors and payment providers. Plus, when combined with other SAP Concur offerings, you get spend visibility across your entire business. Matching capabilities make it possible to compare invoices with POs, and quickly find discrepancies and exceptions. Concur Invoice also offers advanced reporting and analytics, including a large number of predefined reports and user-friendly dashboards that help finance make fast, informed decisions to improve cash flow.
All of this leads to major productivity gains and time and cost savings for AP, invoicing, and business travel teams as well as for business users.
With Concur Invoice, survey respondents experienced an average of:
- 75% less time to process an invoice
- 42% fewer delayed payments
- 46% more efficient invoice handling teams
- 45% more efficient accounts payable staff
All of this added up to $137,000 annual savings on accounts payable-related costs.
These efficiency improvements in turn are allowing companies to handle 11% more invoices with the same staff. Automation has also led to a 33% reduction in reporting errors, lower error-related costs, and to 13% faster payment to vendors.
From a financial management perspective, Concur Invoice improves spend visibility and control. Company spend policy and approval workflows can be built right into the solution, lowering the risk of rogue or fraudulent spending. And enhanced reporting coupled with back-office integration mean finance teams spend less time compiling data and more time focused on maximizing profitability. In fact, since deploying Concur Invoice, survey respondents reported an average of 18% more employees following company compliance and 40% more efficient auditing staff. IDC projects that these improvements are worth an annual average of $231,000 per organisation ($1,136 per 1,000 invoices).
The intuitive, self-service capabilities available with Concur Invoice help users across the business save time. For survey respondents, this has led to a 2.6% higher user productivity overall, with an estimated annual average value of $231,500 per organisation ($1,138 per 1,000 invoices). Plus, reduced reliance on IT, means that support staff can refocus their energy on strategic tasks.
From AP, to finance, IT, and LoB users, Concur Invoice delivers efficiency gains, productivity improvements, and cost savings across your entire business. It also helps improve compliance and lowers your risk of fraud, while helping you build stronger, more advantageous vendor relationships.
On top of all that, IDC calculates a three-year ROI of 634% with a four-month payback period.
So, what are you waiting for?
Read the full IDC White Paper to find out how you can empower your whole business with Concur Invoice. Then visit us at www.concur.com to get started.
*Source: IDC White Paper, sponsored by SAP, SAP Concur Facilitates Automated Management of Financial Operations, doc #US46224320, May 2020.