In August 2012, sharedserviceslink.com and Ariba partnered up to run a survey on the state of e-invoicing. They wanted to better understand the drivers, considerations and fears. The study attracted 184 responses. Here are some of their key findings:
Efficiency still is the main driver for e-invoicing
The respondents mentioned process efficiency as the top argument (40%), followed by cost savings (30%) and service improvement (10%).
Reduction in manual touch points and improvements in invoice quality are key
60% of survey respondents said about 40% of their AP staff are dedicated to responding to supplier inquire. It follows that significant cost savings can come by eliminating errors and exceptions. Many e-invoicing tools now come with a supplier portal which reduces the volume of calls hitting the helpdesk.
Optimising working capital
70% of the respondents captured less than half of their available discount opportunities. This represents a great opportunity to achieve further savings. Ariba and sharedserviceslink.com point out that you should account for this in your business case – it can multiply the ROI by a factor of ten.
Organisation structure
61% of respondents with e-invoicing have a shared service centre (SSC) for their finance function, while only 31% of those organisations with no-plans for e-invoicing have a SSC. Almost all of those organisations that receive and process greater than 250,000 invoices annually run centralised finance or shared services. This suggests that those with an SSO are more geared to business improvement and relish enablers like e-invoicing. Or even simpler: the bigger you are the more you are prone to shared services and e-invoicing.
Source: Is e-invoicing the right technology to leverage success?
Cláudia Wada on 