The urge is always there, to start your document management initiative big, and in broad strokes make sweeping changes. Then you remember other projects and initiatives and how well the “broad stroke approach” worked with projects of that scope. Planning, getting buy-in, meeting each stakeholders needs – an insurmountable task with a predictable outcome: frustration and lost opportunity. 

Having learned this lesson all too well, we are seeing savvy organizations take a more measured approach to their document management implementations, tackling specific processes and getting quick wins that demonstrate valuable benefits to other groups. Two such organizations are Teasdale Quality Foods and Skolnik Industries.

Teasdale launched their document management initiative to automate their AP department with great success. Teasdale’s automation of invoice processing was so successful that, within months, the Accounts Receivable process was also automated. They are now setting their sights on automating processes in their Human Resources department.

Skolnik Industries used the ACOM document management solution to automate their sales order processes. The system has been such a success that the Skolnik team is already thinking about utilizing the solution’s OCR functionality to automate data entry, and extending it to Accounts Payable to automate invoice processing.

What’s your biggest pain point? The answer varies widely, ranging from a process to a particular document that is being handled in high volumes. Whatever the answer, begin your initiative solving that issue/challenge. You’ll gain invaluable experience, and the success will make it much easier to get approval for extending the benefit of document management to the entire organization.

If you’d like to read more about either of these implementations, here are full case studies:

• Teasdale-http://www.acom.com/document_management/CS_DM_Teasdale.html
• Skolnik- http://www.acom.com/document_management/CS_DM_Skolnik.html 

Implementing Document Management- Start Focused and Extend is a post from ACOM Solutions.

Addressing each of the documents individually slows down the workflow, causes delays, and forces workers to focus on tasks that, in the end, may not be as important as others.

The documents essential to driving the organization may be swamped under piles of other documents. How do you dig through thousands of documents to find what’s necessary? Finding the essential documents doesn’t necessarily require re-engineering each individual document. So what documents are necessary?

Understanding the Pareto Principle

Before we take a look at document management, let’s take a look at the Pareto Principle. The Pareto principle, also known as the 80-20 rule, might help you better manage your documents. The principle states that a majority of problems in a certain event are a result of only a few causes.

The principle was coined by Joseph M. Juran, a business consultant, who named it after Vilfredo Pareto. Pareto, a 19^th century Italian economist, observed in 1906 that 80% of the land and wealth in Milan was owned by 20% of the population. He expanded the principle by observing that 80% of the peas he yielded in his garden came from 20% of the pea pods.

This principle has been observed in other fields as well.

• In modern healthcare, it has been observed that 80% of health care resources are used by 20% of the patients.
• During human gestation, the embryonic period takes up 20% of the whole, while fetal development takes up the rest of the time.
• In business, it’s well understood as a general rule of thumb that 80% of a company’s sales will come from 20% of the company’s clients.

Juran applied the principle by suggesting that a majority of the problems in a business can be solved by targeting the few major causes.

Still, what do land, peas, and fetuses have to do with managing documents?

Applying the Pareto Principle

If you apply the Pareto Principle in the way Joseph M. Juran intended, you can greatly reduce the overwhelming pile of documents towering over you.

In terms of the Pareto Principle, directing your attention to the “vital few” documents in your arbitrary pile will consequently lead you to the most important documents. When sorting through the documents, ask yourself and your employees some questions.

• Which documents have the greatest influence on workflow efficiency?
• Which documents are the most troublesome to efficiency?
• Which documents have the biggest influence on the numbers?
• Which serve your ultimate goal or vision?
• Which documents are the most costly or otherwise wasteful of resources?

You will find that, of the entire whole of documents, only a few are actually important to running your business. Others will probably be redundant, out-of-date, or obsolete and can therefore be eliminated to improve future efficiency.

Where to Look

Though the sheer variety of organizations needing document management solutions makes identifying a specific document as a prime candidate for the “list” difficult, there are places you can focus. Look to documents integral to multi-step approval processes, as well as documents that have importance with respect to legal or compliance concerns. Review folders on your network that have passwords in place to restrict access. You may also benefit from watching your file room for an hour or two, which document types are being accessed or stored most frequently?

Simple Approach to Better Results

To restate simply, focus your document management initiative on the 20% of documents that will give you the greatest return on investment. By doing so, you will maximize returns and likelihood of success with your implementation.

The Pareto Principle and Strategies for Managing Documents is a post from ACOM Solutions.

CFOs now have access to vital information that can be used to help management make quicker and more effective decisions and the CEO is expecting new information to be strategically used to blunt the sharp edge of the tough economic climate. A CFO is now deeply involved in enterprise-wide strategy, not just number crunching and reporting, but risk management and decision making.

With the new technology comes more responsibility. The tough business environment today forces corporations to find ways to innovate and improve their processes to remain competitive. A majority of CEOs blame external threats like the economy and end-to-end supply chain visibility as the core of their businesses problems. All too often, we see that the CEOs are expecting the finance department to manage the challenges and offer solutions. The CFO and finance department in an enterprise is being squeezed to come up with a way to overcome the modern day challenges.

To continue on the path of increasing responsibilities, CFOs need to figure out how they are going to close the gap between corporate expectations and their ability to execute. The budget will continue to shrink for their department meanwhile more advanced auditing, reporting, and analytics will be required to succeed. It is not an impossible task, but one that requires implementing new business processes and technology that will increase efficiency, time management, and automating of reporting.

How will CFOs address this challenge? Automation and outsourcing are topping the list of ways to meet CEO expectations without expanding budgets.

Automation is often touted as a solution, but the solutions can often create silos of information that will create new challenges as CFOs seek to gain control over the flood of information these systems can produce.

Selecting integrated solutions is an obvious remedy. One example is the combination of ERP and document management solutions. Only a small portion of a company’s information is contained in the ERP databases. Most is in the form of documents, such as invoices, legal records, and correspondence, which are often stored separately (frequently as paper documents in file cabinets or offsite storage). The resulting inefficiencies are as profound as the solution is simple.

By having a document management solution integrated with financial/ERP applications files are instantly retrievable from the application screen they relate to. Electronic workflows, approval processes, and other automation capabilities are all more effective when working in tandem with primary business applications like ERP. Supporting this point, a recent AIIM survey showed  68% of surveyed professionals felt that linking ERP and document/content management gave a better or much better return on investment than other IT integration projects.

CFO Sleepwalking? It’s alright, they’re just overloaded like you are. is a post from ACOM Solutions.

A primary concern is that ERPs can cover a great deal of your business transaction requirements but do not have a means to deal with the myriad of paper documents related to the transactions processed by the system. Like having coffee without a cup; without a container, all the documents produced and received end up spilling out everywhere and you have no control over where they end up or how to get them when you need them. Some companies who have not fully converted over to an ERP system using document management will still print out and manually file away the thousands of pieces of papers every week.

This represents a large step backwards in the process of business process automation and negatively impacts the benefits a company can see from using an ERP. Implementing a document management system that is integrated with your enterprise applications will greatly reduce costs involved with printing, filing, and searching for files. Further they enable instant retrieval facilitating audits, and provide advanced search and audit trails that can be invaluable in the case of compliance and legal requirements.

Studies show that the average office worker will spend a 15% of their day searching for files, many filed away incorrectly and some never found. Integrating a document management system into enterprise applications like ERP can not only eliminates time spent searching for files, it can do so without disrupting the way people currently work. Files related to the screen being viewed can be retrieved in a single click. Consider an employee in accounts payable responding to a vendor payment inquiry; instead of having to leave their desk and go to a file room for documents, they can pull up the transaction in their ERP and with a click be able to view and share all documents related to that purchase and see where the invoice stands in the approval process.

A recent AIIM whitepaper ‘Connecting ERP and ECM: Measuring the benefits’ discusses the clear benefits of integrating the two technologies. AIMs’ research showed the biggest business benefit of linking ERP to enterprise content management (synonymous with enterprise document management or EDM in terms of the technologies being discussed) is the productivity gained by linking document and process workflows. The same research also revealed that 68% of surveyed professionals felt that linking ERP and ECM gave a better or much better return on investment than other IT integration projects.

Even with an ERP system in place, most transactions involve numerous paper documents, and require employees to physically move them through their various business processes. The benefits of an ERP system with integrated document management will be seen immediately. Never again will that one important document be lost under a stack of papers on the wrong person’s desk or lost in the mail. Instantaneous access, electronic workflow, and centralized storage will streamline your business and let you and your employees focus on more important tasks.

ERP Without Document Management is Like Coffee Without a Cup: It Just Makes a Mess and You Get Burned is a post from ACOM Solutions.

While most businesses and accounts payable department employees understand the 2/10 net 30 terms, what they may not realize is that the terms also offer the opportunity for a business to create a 36% return on the money they save from these 2% early payment discounts. Essentially they are asking to be paid 20 days early, 2% for 20 days equates to 36% for 360 days. How many investments does your organization have with a 36% return?

Have different terms? Your mileage may vary, but here’s a list of effective annual interest rates as calculated by the American Institute of Professional Bookkeepers:

1/10 net 30 = 18.2%

2/10 net 30 = 36.7%

2/10 net 60 = 14.7%

3/10 net 30 = 55.7%

3/10 net 60 = 22.3%

The problem is that many businesses are unable to take advantage of early payment discounts because of the time and labor it takes an organization to manually process invoices. In fact, invoice processing often takes so long that a business cannot even meet the thirty day due date, incurring late fees, usually around 2%.

So not only do slow accounts payable processes cost businesses the money they could be saving through early payment discount opportunities, but also they sometimes end up costing themselves an additional 2% on top of the total cost. Depending on how many invoices are paid during a fiscal year, an organization can either save or spend a great deal of money.

There are many steps of the payment process that businesses must go through before payment can actually reach a vendor, and when these steps are done manually, it becomes nearly impossible for a business to earn early payment discounts. For one thing, the ten days are ten real days, not ten business days. In addition, the ten day time period begins the day the invoice is printed, not the day a business’s AP department receives the invoice. By the time an invoice is received and processing begins, the invoice must still:

• Be sent to the appropriate person for approval
• Be copied and filed
• Be paid by paper check, which must be prepared and printed
• Be sent back to the vendor with payment through the mail
• Be received and processed by the vendor

Since at least one weekend must be factored into the ten-day period, a business may only realistically have one or two days to process the invoice and get it sent back out with payment if they are to receive an early payment discount.

Some facts about invoice payment processes:

• It takes a company an average of 23 days to manually process invoices.
• Early payment discounts can be anywhere from one to three percent, but are usually offered at a standard 2% if paid within ten days.
• Late payment penalties are often incurred after thirty days if an invoice goes unpaid or is not paid in full. The penalty is usually also around 2%.
• Late payment penalties may be applied if a company pays an invoice expecting to receive a 2% early payment discount, but the payment is not received until after the thirty-day period has passed, because the invoice has not been paid in full. Although most vendors will simply re-bill the company for the remaining 2%, it still costs a business the time and other resources it takes to pay the same bill twice.

Other ways that manual invoice processing can cost money include:

• The need to pay more staff members to spend more time processing invoices.
• Incorrect payments and lost invoices cause late fees to incur.
• Duplicate invoices that move through the system can result in duplicate payments.
• Paper-based systems cost a business 40 to 60% more to process each invoice.

On the other hand, companies with automated AP systems average only five days to process invoices, giving them the chance to take advantage of early payment discounts almost every time an invoice is paid. Businesses can save themselves a great deal of money by converting to automated AP systems and by flagging their largest vendor accounts for priority payment to make sure that they put their resources into paying their most costly invoices first, in order to receive the greatest early payment discounts.

How automated AP systems work:

• Purchase orders are auto-captured and indexed into a document management system when they are generated.
• Invoices are auto-captured and indexed into the same system when they are received. When paper invoices are received they can be scanned into the system.
• Related transactional and shipping documents can also be captured and linked to the invoice facilitating approvals and vendor inquiries.
• Invoices and payments are moved through the electronic approval process and signed for electronically.
• Invoices are paid electronically via ACH further accelerating the process and enabling precise payment timing.

Automated systems can greatly reduce problems such as incorrect payments and lost or duplicate invoices. Late payment fees are also minimized, and early payment discounts are much more easily realized. When compared to the relatively low cost of converting an AP department to an automated system, the savings more than pay for themselves and create a healthy investment with returns that can quickly add up.

When Does 2% Really Mean 36%? is a post from ACOM Solutions.

Today, businesses large and small are still struggling to get everyone on board with e-payments, but the uphill battle is coming to an end. Nearly half of a company’s payments are now being done electronically. Studies show that business-to-business payments using paper checks declined from 74% in 2007 to 57% in 2010.

The U.S. economy is still struggling and both businesses and consumers are feeling the pinch. Although investing in new solutions goes against common business practices during a recession, the electronic payment industry is growing at a rapid pace. Electronic payment software solutions are helping companies reduce costs, risks, and labor involved with their accounts payable and receivable departments. The recession might be the perfect catalyst for moving towards complete adoption of business-to-business e-payments.

ACH payments are quickly taking the place of traditional paper checks. The 2010 AFP Electronics Payment survey done by J.P. Morgan found that financial professionals experience a number of noticeable benefits by converting to electronic payment systems. Of financial professionals, 52% experience significant cost savings, 40% experienced improved cash forecasting, and 37% saw an improvement in fraud control. Respondents of the survey also indicated that their businesses would most likely be completely converted to e-payments in the next three years; showing the high expectations and acceptance of e-payments.

Barriers to adoption of electronic payments: Every business will face similar challenges in implementing electronic payment systems. The number one concern is convincing vendors and clients to switch over to e-payments with them. New third party software solutions are now available to handle practically all of the barriers to adoption that have held the business world back the past few years.

• Convincing suppliers – Instead of calling, faxing, and emailing every vendor and supplier manually to switch over to e-payments, automated software can now add special notes to traditional checks, send automated emails, and have an online portal where vendors can submit an application in one easy step.
• No automated remittance – Mailing paper remittances defeats the purpose of going completely automated. With new software solutions available, an automated remittance will be sent alongside the electronic payment. All completed without human hands making a mess of things.
• No standard remittance format – There is still a lack of one national or international e-payment remittance format, but automated electronic payment systems can easily be customized to fit a business’s standard accounting formats.
• Shortage of IT resources – Many companies that hesitate to convert to electronic payments are concerned they lack the IT resources to make the transition. Choosing the right software and provider can minimize additional labor hours in your IT group with simple bolt on integrations and implementation services included in the package.

This year, 2011, is projected to be the tipping point for businesses to automate their accounts payable and accounts receivable departments. They will save a significant amount of money by cutting postage, labor, and processing costs. The exposure to check fraud should be greatly reduced with successful conversion to ACH e-payments simply because the checks will not be used to the same extent. Cash flow will be easier to project, as payments can be precisely scheduled enabling organizations to maximize DPO without missing discounts.

E-Payments to Increase in Popularity in 2011 is a post from ACOM Solutions.

While most businesses are already using ACH payments in one way or another, they are often unable to use it for invoices. Studies show that most employees are being paid using the electronic ACH system because it gets rid of paper checks, trips to the bank, delays, fraud, and all the hassles involved with receiving and depositing weekly paychecks. It makes complete sense why everyone prefers what is referred to as a “direct deposit”; but why are companies not realizing the same benefits when dealing with vendors?

Benefits of using ACH for vendor payments:

• Lower printing and processing – The hassle of printing hundreds of invoices or even worse, checks, every week and processing them through accounts payable, the appropriate department, and sending it out via snail mail is bogging down companies.
• Costs – The average payment using traditional paper processing costs a company around $2.00 and upwards if processing, check stock, envelopes, and postage are factored in. Companies that are using ACH have a cost-per-payment of around 15 cents. With hundreds or thousands of payments going out monthly in a mid-market business, the potential for cost savings is dramatic. A business can expect savings near $40,000 per year if they are sending 2,000 accounts payable checks per month via ACH instead of manually.
• Greater security through reduced vulnerability to fraud – Saving money is great, but improving security is crucial for businesses today. By converting to an electronic payment system, human error and fraud are drastically reduced by simply removing employee’s hands from the process. No one touches the checks in the office, in the postal system, or even in the vendor’s office. ACH removes all chances of check tampering that has been a problem for years.
• Less manual activity and greater staff productivity – Traditional payment processing is a manual, labor-intensive process that adds unnecessary work to your employees’ day. Automate the process and enjoy the improved productivity of your employees since they aren’t dealing with the tedious task of creating and mailing checks.
• Better cash management – Managing your accounts payable manually leaves room for error, lack of oversight, and disconnect between the budget and vendor payments. Management will have a clearer picture of what money is coming in and out when it is all done electronically and simple weekly or monthly reports are delivered via email.

Barriers to entry: Why don’t 100% of businesses use ACH already? Despite the cost, security, productivity, and management benefits, many companies have not realized the full benefit of ACH for accounts payable because their vendors are not set up to accept electronic payments. Informing, convincing, and switching vendors to ACH can seem like a daunting task that no company wants to take on. The only easy way around it is to have an automated system in place that will help you to convert your vendors to using ACH payments. Seeing this need in our own AP department we created an automated process to promote ACH payment to vendors, and a vendor portal that allows vendors to self-register for electronic payments.

Did it work?

We were successful converting over 70% of our vendors to ACH, without having to make a bunch of phone calls and wasting staff time entering the data. It is a simple process that takes full advantage of the systems you already have in place:

1.      Message on checks – A small note will be added to all of the vendor’s checks that states the money could have already been in their account electronically using ACH and that they could have received their remittance detail instantly via email.

2.      Automated email – An email is sent out to all of your vendors letting them know their payments have been processed and placed in the mail. An additional note is added about how the remittance note and payment could have already been delivered using ACH. A web address URL is provided for more information on converting to ACH payments.

3.      Self-registration – Vendors finally get the hint and head to the self-registration portal online. They fill out the appropriate information and electronically submit the application to your accounting department.

4.      ACH payments – You have the control to authorize their applications and once you do, ACH payments are set up and ready to go.

Other organizations using this process are seeing very similar results, so the key takeaway here is you don’t have to settle for low adoption of ACH payment among your vendors. ACH can provide some great efficiencies and cost reductions, but only if you can extend it to a significant portion of your payments.

ACH for Accounts Payable is a post from ACOM Solutions.

Types of check fraud today:

1.      Stolen checks: Even corporate checks end up in a good old fashioned mail box from time to time and that is a prime location for check thieves to conduct their work. This is a much larger problem for individuals, but businesses are not immune to having their checks stolen.

2.      Check alteration: The simplest way to steal a company’s money is by making the slightest adjustment that most people in the company will overlook. By just adding an extra zero to the amount you can easily turn a $300 check into a $3000 check. This type of fraud usually happens in the payroll department.

3.      Copying checks: Copiers, scanners, and printers are extremely advanced and can produce a check that looks identical but with some slight variation to benefit the thief. Changing the name and then running it through a color copier is one of the easiest ways to steal money from a business.

4.      Stolen materials: Although pre-printed check stock is making its way out of the business world, some companies still use it. That is the equivalent of leaving cash laying around in the office,

5.      Home printing: If you combine advanced computer software with someone that took a college course using Photoshop, you have created a home banker. A person with a knack for computers can figure out how to print checks from home that will look and work identically like your businesses.

6.      Internal check fraud: Tough economic times will usually lead people to make poor decisions they otherwise wouldn’t. In the case of check fraud, employees with constant access to your accounts payable process might be tempted to use their special access to print checks especially for them.

Check fraud may seem like a daunting task to get under control and completely prevent, but there are well known processes and strategies that can be implemented to create a foolproof system. All employees, especially the signors, need to be fully trained on the new check fraud prevention strategies.

Check fraud defense strategies:

1.      Positive pay: Positive pay is the latest bank technology that helps create a checks and balance type of accounts payable system. When your accounts payable team cuts a check, all of that check’s information is automatically sent over in an electronic file to the bank. When the checks are processed, the bank makes sure the check number, amount, payee, date, and signature all match the original information on the file sent over from the business. Positive pay is a great way for eliminating multiple types of check fraud, but it is not foolproof all by itself.

2.      Blank check stock: If you have not already, now is a great time to do away with pre-printed checks and begin using blank check stock. The blank paper is useless to someone wanting to manipulate or write their own checks. When you use blank check stock, you have an electronic system installed that processes the data from one computer and image from another file and a check is not created until both of those pieces of information meet up at the printer.

3.      Set bank policies: Banks are capable of setting up several rules for your account that would set off red flags. For example, you can have them return any check over a certain amount or that has exceeded a certain time frame. Another good preventative measure is to require two signatures on checks exceeding a certain amount.

4.      Reduce access: The less people that have access to your accounts payable and check writing system, the less chances you will be susceptible to check fraud. Keep track of who has access and consistently change the keys and codes to any printed checks and software.

5.      Split up tasks: If you have three different people responsible for cutting checks, split up their responsibilities so everyone at one point in time touches each and every check. One person could issue and sign checks, another can reconcile the bank statement, and a third can process accounts payable. This offers a kind of checks and balances, and employees become more accountable for their actions.

Positive Pay and Other Defenses Against Check Fraud is a post from ACOM Solutions.

Benefits of Digital Payment Solutions

• Saving Money: The top 20% most efficient businesses will incur $2 in costs for every invoice processed while the bottom 30% will spend $29 on average for each invoice (Source: Aberdeen Group, 2007). Your business likely falls somewhere between those two numbers, both of which are unacceptable and waste too much money processing invoices. When a company converts to digital payment processing, they almost completely eliminate all costs associated with receiving and paying paper invoices.
• Speeding Up Payments: The above average accounts payable departments take 8.6 days to process a single invoice from start to finish while the laggards in the industry take an average 20.3 days (Source: Aberdeen Group, 2007). No vendor likes to receive late payments and your accounting department sure doesn’t want to receive an invoice a month after it was due. With a digital payment solution, your company can have the quickest turnaround out of all your vendor’s partners.
• Reducing Risk: Manually receiving, sorting, paying, and filing invoices leaves a lot of room for human error. When more than one person handles an invoice, papers get lost, stacked under other invoices, and forgotten. Another issue larger than human error is check fraud. Businesses don’t realize how prevalent check fraud still is today and they need to take action for protection and prevention. Converting to a digital accounts payable system will almost completely eliminate the common risks involved with paper invoices and payments.
• Early Payment Discounts: Many vendors offer early payment discounts for clients. It is almost impossible to take advantage of these discounts when a business processes invoices manually. Once they convert to digital accounting and automated payments, they can capitalize on every discount and drastically reduce the costs associated with accounts payables.
• Electronic Records: Paper records are quickly disappearing in the business world because of all the studies showing costs and risks associated with them. When a business converts to a digital payment solution, all of their records will be stored and backed up digitally. This small difference in accounting will save a company from having to conduct labor-intensive searches for documents. Simply search through one central electronic database and find what you are looking for within seconds.
• Administrative Costs: Manual payment processing requires additional employees, labor hours, and supplies like envelopes and checks. As noted before, your company can easily be in the group spending almost $30 per invoice processed. By changing over to a digital payment solution, you can easily bring the cost per invoice down below $2 and begin reaping the financial benefits of cutting administrative costs.
• Partners Adopt Digital Payment Solution: Not every partner of yours will already have changed over to accepting electronic ACH payments, but you can nudge them along to help save you even more money in the future. The quicker everyone your company does business with adapts to the new technology available, the faster you will begin saving time and money. Top solutions available today include a vendor outreach that automatically helps your vendors along towards accepting electronic payments from you.
• Spending Analysis: Electronic documentation and digital payments means that all of your transactional documents are easily accessible and viewable instantly. Documents can be retrieved and sent to the appropriate people instantly, giving management a clear view of expenses.
• Reduced Storage: By far one of the most noticeable effects of digital payment solutions is the reduction in necessary storage space. Remove those bulky file cabinets and stop wasting money on a monthly storage unit that is just holding on to old documents. Everything will be located in a central database on your computers and backed up so even if a disaster such as a fire or flood destroys your office, you still have all of your documents intact.

Uses of Digital Payment Solutions

• Automatic Payments: A business can automatically pay vendors and clients using ACH, EFT, Wire, Card Payment, or a Check. All of these can be processed through your digital payment solution and instantly be sent after the approval process completes.
• Multiple Payment Options: Your vendors might prefer one payment method over the other and with a digital payment solution you can accommodate them and hopefully capitalize on any discounts they provide for using their requested format.
• Streamlined Reporting: Monthly, quarterly and annual reports will seem easier than ever if you are using a digital payment solution. All of the invoices can be captured electronically and linked to the correct transactions and accounts throughout the year and there is little room for error compared to manual approaches.

Uses and Benefits of Digital Payment Solutions is a post from ACOM Solutions.

The perfect three-way match involves the proper examination of the invoice, the purchase order, and the receiving document. Getting that perfect trifecta is important for making accurate transactions and maintaining efficiency.

Of course, matching up all three of those documents might prove a little difficult. After all, we are only human and prone to making mistakes. Here are some tips to help you better handle invoices.

Avoid paying from copies. Invoice copies are the main culprit for duplicate and fraudulent payments. If you insist on paying from copies, make sure the copy has been approved from a high level. It would also help to go through the master vendor files to check if any previous payments (of the same dollar amount) have been made.

Keep yourself organized. It might seem more like a life lesson than a means of handling payments, but keeping things organized can simplify all aspects of the payment process.

• Keeping your transaction documents neatly organized can help your team find and match documents quickly and with as little hassle as possible.
• Organize your invoices individually as opposed to clumping them together into one voucher. This will make things easier on you if/when you need to locate and respond to individual invoices.
• Assign responsibilities for vendors alphabetically or some other arbitrary organization. Giving your AP employees a certain block of your vendors to take care of is an easy way to keep track of duties and increase efficiency.
• It might be common knowledge, but all your invoices should have a general ledger code. Plain and simple. It will help with keeping a record of your transactions.

Communication is key. Another potential life lesson, but maintaining good communication within all steps of the invoice process is of utmost importance.

• Although it seems logical for the vendor to send the bill to whomever originally placed the order, it would actually be more rational to send the invoice to Your Friendly Neighborhood Accounts Payable Professionals. This will ensure speedy, on-time payments.
• Stay in close contact with your vendors. Whether it’s through phone or email, communicating with vendors through every step of the process will keep you in the know and could help you catch any problems before they happen. For example, if the amount in an invoice doesn’t match what’s being paid, you can easily contact your vendors, with an adjustment letter or a simple email, to figure out the inconsistencies.
• A negative assurance, or an assumed receipt, sends a confirmation email to a buyer. Along with confirming the order, the email tells the buyer that invoices have been received and that, by not responding to the email within a certain amount of time, the invoice will be paid. This is a simple way of keeping the buyer informed while maintaining timely (and hopefully accurate) payments.

Make use of technology – In this day and age, it helps to know a thing or two about technology and to apply it appropriately.

• Automated clearing house (ACH) debits allow for quick, direct payment as soon as an order is shipped. This bypasses the need for an invoice entirely, though you should also take precautions to avoid payment fraud.
• There’s quite a bit of software available that can help you handle your invoices. ACOM has an integrated document management system that provides all the services you need for managing your invoices and processing payments. Automated forms mean faster flow of information and transactions without any post office delays.
• A big plus to using more technology and software means a significant reduction in paper waste, which is an advantage if you and your organization want to stay green.

Most importantly, be careful and be observant. Most slip-ups in the payment process occur in its last stages. Whether it’s a copy of the purchase order or a packing slip, the receiving document will often be marked with a quick, dismissive “received.” This might be fine for those lucky few who are entirely positive that they’ve received the right shipments, but it would probably be wise to take that extra bit of time to check the contents of the shipped item to make sure everything is correct and in working order.

Keep these tips in mind and you’ll have no problem getting that perfect three-way match.

Proven Practices for Invoice Handling is a post from ACOM Solutions.