Determining the Costs to Process an Invoice Without Automation
The average cost to process an invoice manually has been pegged at between $15 and $20 by various studies, and polls of a sample of Octacom’s clients. This, of course, depends on whether line items are captured and costs, proportion of PO vs. non-PO invoices, and whether 3-way matching is a part of invoice processing.
When you consider invoice exceptions, where an error is identified in the invoice that requires time to resolve internally or with a vendor, they can require a significant amount of time and complexity to the task, increasing that cost to $60 or more.
Octacom finds that average exception rates are as little as 3% of total invoices processed, but can be as high as 10% or more depending on compliance internally in the PO process and vendor compliance to listing items correctly on their invoices.
Knowing that approximately 95% or more of invoices can result in straight-through processing, there are ample savings for companies that are contemplating AP Automation, by reducing the cost to process from $20 today to as little as $1 per invoice.
If your business is spending an unreasonable amount of time and money within your AP department correcting errors and manually handling paper invoices, you should consider automating your AP processes.
Here are the main advantages of replacing manual invoice processing with AP automation:
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Eliminate manual data entry of invoice data
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Automate 2-way or 3-way PO matching
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Manage exceptions digitally with ease
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Manage approval workflows digitally
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Achieve 24 hour turnaround times with 99.9% + accuracy
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Enable your AP team to focus on more strategic areas of payables, including spend management analysis
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Increase financial certainty and efficiency ratios with low per invoice pricing
Octacom is a SOC 2, Type II Audited enterprise software and services company focused on document and data automation solutions, including automated data capture. Founded in 1976, Octacom specializes in accounts payable automation and automated invoice processing, among other digital / automated business process outsourcing services.
If your organization is looking to learn more about our solutions and services, please contact us and we would be glad to help.
