The Pain:  Missed profit targets

Your company grows in leaps and bounds each year. Clients with checks in hand beat down a path to your door. And yet, profit margins are consistently smaller than expected. How can this be?

Everyday business practices often include hidden costs that can chip away at your company’s revenues, causing it to miss the mark on profits. Manual document processing in particular can rob a company of hundreds of thousands of dollars each year.

Below are some of the reasons for this pain:

• Increasing labor costs: Manually processing data off thousands of incoming documents each month requires a significant labor force. Salaries, benefits and overtime for all of these full-time employees become a major expense flagged for a targeted task. As your company grows, so do the volume of documents and the costs incurred to process them manually. As these costs rise, profits shrink.

• Late payments: Maybe your company processes data off invoices – lots of them. Doing so manually can delay the payment approval process, and this can make your company late in paying the vendor. Many vendors charge hefty late payment fees, and these add up quickly when you have backlogged invoices to process.

• Missed discount opportunities: Many vendors offer incentives to companies that pay their invoices early. When invoices are late to be processed and approved for payment and invoice volumes continue to rise, early pay discounts often become an unreachable goal. Unfortunately, this is easy profit your company can consistently miss by processing invoices manually.

• Duplicate payments: Companies that process a volume of invoices occasionally overlook those that have been paid already, so the invoice gets paid twice. Once the error gets detected, the company must decide if the overpaid amount justifies the time, effort and money to recoup the overpayment. Either way, the company loses – either in productivity or the amount paid twice.

A solution with the following capabilities can cure your pain:

• Same workload with fewer staff: An automated solution requires a fraction of the FTEs to handle the same amount of work, and more, than does a manual data entry process. The remaining staff can be trained to perform more business-critical tasks throughout the company, resulting in fewer rehires due to attrition and therefore significant labor cost savings.

• Prompt payment schedules: If you handle invoices, the process and approval time for these documents is completed in record time. You then can pay the invoices promptly, avoiding any costly late fees.

• Increased discount opportunities: Since invoices get approved much sooner, your company can take advantage of early payment discounts each month, which can add up to considerable savings, and more profit, over time.

• Payment controls: Using a database table lookup, an automated solution can access your financial database during processing to match an invoice with its corresponding purchase order number. Paid invoices are flagged for review, preventing duplicate payment.

Learn how a utility company automated their accounts payable department with an AnyDoc solution to reduce backlog by 90% while saving $240,000 in labor costs and reducing invoice processing from days to hours.

Let AnyDoc Software help your company rein in the excessive costs of document processing that make you miss your targeted profit margins.