I was chairing the ‘Toning Up Purchase to Pay to Attain Touchless Processing’ conference last week in London, and one speaker from a huge industrial manufacturing company spoke about hitting 50% electronic invoicing country by country by using a patchwork of different providers to convert suppliers.  

Coming from working for an e invoicing provider in the past, some of his views left me coughing a little in slight disbelief.  I am not sure if he was throwing out a few hand grenades into the audience to see what would happen, or if these views were real and profound.  Let’s have a look at what caused such a stir.  Controversial View Number 1 was: if a supplier is sending 10,000 invoices or less per annum, you may as well process their invoices via an OCR solution.  Crikey!  The threshold when I sold e invoicing was 100.  They use an OCR bureau based out in Australia to OCR invoices, and the bureau has an SLA of over 95% capture rate accuracy.  They are also cheap.  So the speaker’s view is ‘why force change?’.  This is a good point.  The company in question though processes 5 million invoices per annum, which may be why the bureau has offered such a competitive price.  You also need to look at the wider financial ramifications, like speed (I bet the invoice data isn’t in the system within 2 hours of the supplier sending the invoice, closing the window for payment discounts), and control (there are still touchpoints, and paper, so there is still the opportunity for lost invoices.  Let’s not forget that with every touchpoint comes an opportunity for extra cost, time wastage, and a loss in quality).

Controversial View Number 2 was: once you have converted 60% of your invoices, I shouldn’t bother with the other 40%.  Wai-hait a minute!  Let’s face it, 60% is good, but we all want to be up there in the 80s and 90s even.  His view is once you have creamed off the high volume suppliers, the resistance offered by the smaller ones is too demanding for the return offered.  

People have different views on e invoicing, driven by organisational structure, countries they operate in etc.  However, if this company changed its approach and enrolled suppliers sending 100 – 10,000 per annum and connected these guys, then the conversion results would eclipse 60% and make that number look pretty pithy.  

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