We’ll go through the typical steps of invoice processing and show you ways to improve the process.

What is invoice processing?

Invoice processing involves the steps required from receiving an Invoice through paying it. This may seem simple. But there are a few steps that go in between and these steps can quickly get complex depending on the size of your business.

Invoices come in all variations these days, such as emails, PDFs, and even paper. With a growing company, these need to get recorded and approved by the right person before being paid.

The bigger the company, the more complex this simple task can be.

Lets dive into this in more detail…

You receive an invoice from a vendor

Once a vendor’s work is completed or their service is provided, they will send you an invoice.

Invoices are typically sent to you via mail (paper document), or email ( PDF document).

The invoice information needs to be added into your accounting system and is typically done manually by an AP clerk.

Quick Fact: Processing a SINGLE invoice can cost your company anywhere from $14 to $20. If your company processes 25,000 invoices per year at $15 per invoice, they will spend $375,000 on invoice processing.

Vendor invoice is scanned into the system

As well as entering the data from the invoice into your system, you’ll want to scan in a copy of the invoice as a backup, just in-case there are some discrepancies and for proper auditing purposes.

Again, this takes time and don’t forget the hardware costs!

Invoice is sent for approval

Once the invoice is in the system, the next step is getting it approved.

In a small business there might be 1 or 2 people who have the authority to approve invoice payments.

You can do this by simply walking over to the correct person and getting approval or sending an email to the that person.

For larger businesses, there might be a more complex set of rules to determine who needs to authorize the invoice payments.

Once approved, Invoice is ready to be paid

Once the correct person has authorized the invoice for payment, the next step is for it to be paid. This may involve sending it to the correct person or department.

Emails can sometimes get lost, or be pushed down the inbox at busy times.

These are the general steps to invoice processing.

Again, depending on the size of the company, the rules and hierarchy can get a lot more complicated.

For most businesses these steps and are all done manually. This is due to the traditionally high costs of setting up invoice process automation.

Working smarter, not harder with A/P One…

CoreIntegrator’s automated invoice processing solution, A/P One is easy and quick to setup, and only pay a small fee for the invoices you process.

Instead of months, you can be up and running in days, and can start saving your company money immediately.

A/P One lets companies work smarter, not harder because it does the work for you.

What would your company do with all of the money and time saved each year?

How A/P One works

Your invoices are streamed to A/P One’s cloud-based service where CoreIntegrator automates the invoice registration and data entry process.

They are then sent directly, from you or your vendor, to a processing center and registered in A/P One.

Invoice data is pre-populated within 24 hours, so when users log into A/P One, they will see a list of invoices waiting to be processed and approved.

With built-in CoreIntegrator Workflow, invoices will be routed for approval based on your specific business rules.

As a result, you can configure the approval matrix based on a multitude of rules, such as:

• Person
• Amount
• Location
• Invoice type
• Vendor

Just think of all the extra projects your company can work on with the employee time saved when processing invoices with A/P One.

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