Transmitted Electric Invoices - OCR
Now to analyze the second camp of electronic invoices; transmitted. Transmitted is by far the sexiest and most talked about type of electronic invoices. It is also the most expensive and hardest to set up, control and work properly. We are going to look at three types of transmitted electronic invoices are OCR, EDI, and XML. Read the rest of this entry »

The American Heritage Dictionary defines “loopy” as “Offbeat; crazy: ‘the loopy energy of Harpo Marx’ (Michael Wood). The dictionary also defines “loopy” as “Consisting of or covered with loops”. In business its always good to be in the loop becuase if you are out of the loop you may be out of business (unless you are in Chicago where it just means your office is located somewhere else).

Wheather you are in or out of the loop - crazy or sane; looping in an invoice approval process is not a good thing.

Executed Electric Invoices – the Downside
The big downside to Executed invoices is the vendor has to do double entry. The first entry is into the accounting system/ERP system as a receivable. Systems are constructed to produce a paper invoice, the invoice is mail to the client and that’s the end of it. If the client requires (asks) the vendor to enter the invoice into a web portal for processing chances are you are going to get some push back.

Here are a few ideas that I have used with clients that works very well. Read the rest of this entry »

When it comes to coding and approving invoices through an electornic approval process centralization is the key. For two reasons:

1. To insure that all invoices get into the system in a timely and consistent manner.

2. Consolidate resources, both hardware and people. Adam Smith was right, people are more productive when they can develop specialties.

Executed Electronic Invoices – the Upside To better understand the different types of electronic invoices we need to divide them into two camps. Camp One is called “Executed.” Camp Two is called “Transmitted.” Executed electronic invoices are sent by the vendor through a web portal. The vendor will have a user name and password to a website. That vendor will take the invoice that was created from the vendor’s accounting system and data enter the information into a form. Once the vendor has entered the information they will submit the form into the portal.

The software that is attached to the portal can use one of three options to distribute the information: Read the rest of this entry »

Electronic Form:

There are two common ways an invoice can get into an electronic from:

(1) The vendor, instead of printing the invoice saves the invoice in a Word Document, Excel file, TIFF, GIF or PDF (just to name a few forms). Once the invoice is saved the vendors emails or posts the file to their website for your company to access.

(2) The invoice is printed and mailed and arrives to your company (hopefully a central location). The invoice is opened, scanned and saved as a TIFF, GIF or PDF (there are other types but these are the most common). Read the rest of this entry »

Introduction

Ask a vendor if they can provide you with electronic data. Chances are they will say yes. Then ask if they can send you a sample. Chances are they will email you a Microsoft Word document that is saved in Adobe’s PDF format. This is not electronic data. Far from it! This seemly innocent slip by your vendor is in reality a huge blunder if you want to automate Accounts Payable.

The AberdeenGroup said that in 2008 the top consideration (at 41% of all of those poled) was to Read the rest of this entry »

I’m more convinced than ever that Users need to invest time and well as money to get an appropriate return on investment. What does that mean? It means that most Users benefit greatly from interacting with other Users. It means that the best ideas for solving problems come from the community of users and not from the vendor. It means that you, as a User, should attend User Conferences to gain a better understanding of how others use the same tools to add more value.

Web 2.0 and community aren’t fads. They are solid business strategies.

It’s easy to focus your decision-making on an application’s current feature-set and functionality; after all, you’re trying to solve for a particular business problem that’s causing some level of pain. As important as it is to consider these things, something that is often overlooked but is maybe more important is whether your solution provider can scale.

Why does scaling matter? Read the rest of this entry »

(SaaS stands for Software-as-a-Service and refers to applications delivered primarily through a web browser. Learn more about SaaS at this site: Basics of SaaS.)

How many SaaS products do we use? At last count, five: for Customer-facing tasks like CRM/SFA (sales and customer service); for managing marketing distributions (marketing); for online registration processes (marketing); for managing our R&D backlog, defect-tracking, and release scheduling (R&D); and, you guessed it, for automated accounts payable (financials).

We’re looking into a few more: for core financials; for network monitoring and management; and for project management.  Why? Read the rest of this entry »