Efficiency Leaders works with organisations to help them master efficiency inside their business.
A powerful way that many companies are becoming more efficient and highly productive is through the introduction of Accounts Payable automation and Forms Processing using ELAP™ (Efficiency Leaders Automation Platform)
ELAP™ automated Accounts Payable solution captures, extracts and transfers critical data from paper or electronic documents / forms to back end systems through seamless integration with line of business processes.
ELAP™ intelligent scanning and distribution solution will even "learn-by-example" and adapt to documents that frequent your business, allowing configuration to be optimised quickly. Intelligent software that improves data quality and reduces data entry costs - Now that’s efficient!
Upon implementing our automated Accounts Payable solution, organisations will benefit from reduced operating costs, increased productivity, better data quality and improved compliance. Organisations will realise solid ROI by reducing labour intensive processes and deploying resources to increase effectiveness and productivity in other areas of the business; thus taking a monumental step on the road to becoming leaders in efficiency.
What is the problem with Accounts Payable?
Data entry is the longest and least skilled part of the whole AP process. It is also the largest bottleneck area and the highest cost area of the process.
In general:
- Low staff retention
- Low motivation
- High ongoing training costs
- Burdensome infrastructure costs
What are the costs of manual processing?
- In 1998 the US-based Institute of Management and Administration put the cost of processing each invoice at $16.54
- In 2006, the same organisation surveyed members along with Datacap and Fujitsu and came up with a figure of $24.00 with a direct labour component of over $7.00
- In 2007, Gartner Group published a report on a survey of the Fortune 500 companies in the US and estimated a figure of just under $35.00 per invoice.
- This last one probably tells us a lot about the cost of bottlenecks in large organisations – the more data you have to process, the greater the bottleneck, the more it costs you.
- The Hackett Group and the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants co-sponsored a benchmarking study of key corporate financial functions. Four hundred international companies, including over 100 major US corporations, participated in this study. The conclusion:
- The average company processes 11,100 invoices per person per year.
- This means that a company processing 100,000 invoices a year will utilise the equivalent of nine full time people during the year for this purpose alone.
In Australia we estimate the costs to be:
- Average wage, including super, annual leave etc, about $45,000, divided by 11,100 invoices is $4.05
- So - direct labour cost alone for payables processing averages $4.05 per invoice
- Direct labour represents 30% of fully allocated payables costs when indirect labour, equipment, postage, supplies, administration, overhead, and other cost components are considered
- Applying this 30% factor to the $4.05 direct labour cost above, yields a fully allocated average payables cost of $13.50 per invoice
White Papers
Business transactions can be thought of as ‘conversations,’ where information is exchanged as documents, email messages, instant messages, and fax transmissions. Effectively communicating with your customers, partners, and suppliers through any combination of these can be a significant challenge. Therefore, it should be no surprise that companies around the globe struggle to solve this problem without increasing their labor costs. This white paper proposes a 5-step approach to automate an accounts payable operation, describing the typical costs of processing invoices manually and the saving that can be achieved with each of the incremental steps.
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