Iron Mountain Invoice Processing

Challenge

For accounts payable (AP) professionals, efficiency and accuracy are paramount. You need to process invoices quickly, remit payments promptly, and manage both to optimize cash flow—all while avoiding errors that could have a long-term impact on the business. But with paper-based and digital invoices sent to multiple locations and inboxes, efficiency and accuracy are a real challenge. 

Impact

If you have invoices in multiple email inboxes, filing cabinets, hard drives, data shares, and so on, you’re missing out on the power of technology to help you do your job more efficiently and accurately. With 70% of enterprises still receiving paper invoices, finding and manually reviewing hundreds of pieces of paper to match invoices for payment can lead to late payments that damage supplier relationships and your organization’s credit rating.

Manually entering data from paper invoices introduces the risk of manual errors or lost invoices. Duplicate payments alone can cost your organization from .8% to 2% of your total payments. Simple keying errors can also lead to overpayments, missed payments, and late payments and leave the door open for fraud.

Inefficiency both slows down payment processing and incurs unnecessary costs. Manually processing an invoice takes 17 business days on average. And, according to the Federal Reserve, of the more than 25 billion invoices sent annually, 75% require manual processing, which costs U.S. businesses approximately $200 billion every year.