Tech solutions reducing processing costs and improving on-time payment percentages

One-third of the businesses in the United States, Canada, Mexico and Brazil report that 20 percent of the value of their client invoices is more than 90 days overdue,[1] according to the Payment Practices Barometer Americas report, a survey conducted by the trade credit insurance company Atradius.

This liquidity squeeze affects more than just the immediate suppliers whose cash flow is restricted by the late payments, but also affects supply chain, multiplies risk for the buyer and, ultimately, drags down the local and global economy. To solve this problem, businesses are partnering with IT experts to automate accounts payable processes.

Across travel, healthcare, telecom, manufacturing, and banking industries, businesses are updating financial and accounting processes and, in turn, widely increasing efficiency and timeliness when it comes to compensating suppliers. With the help of IT solutions providers, organizations are making these improvements by implementing solutions such as standardized accounting and reporting practices and a common mid-office system.

Bhupender Singh, CEO of global BPO Intelenet® Global Services, comments:  “It is imperative that companies now regulate their financial and accounting processes through automation. Through deploying the proper solutions to face business challenges like late payments, not only have on-time payments improved from 80 percent to 98.5 percent but processing costs were reduced from 69 cents to 30 cents per invoice.

To help minimize the occurrence of overdue payments, Intelenet has seen direct results to organizations by developing dashboards to highlight dependencies to their business, team restructuring, and implement effective work force management processes.”

Singh added: “Through implementing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), businesses are significantly increasing their percentage of bills paid on time, and reaping the benefits of transforming company processes from manual invoicing to E-invoicing. Assisting companies in cost-effective solutions like Optical Character Recognition (OCR), which allows for the electronic translation of data into an automatic machine-editable text, and introducing e-bill templates for electronic upload to their finance systems, Intelenet has helped businesses across industries to solve this widespread challenge, and those who have automated already are not looking back.”