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Sample vendor invoice pdf for Administration

foreign [Music] Tech webcast I'm Shelly Kramer principal analyst and founding partner here at Future and research and today I am joined by Richard Pasco who is the vice president of consulting services for a plexus and we are going to talk about a gnarly subject and that is invoice management everybody cringes when they hear that right uh so but we but the reality of it is you don't need to cringe and we're going to talk about uh how technology plays a role in getting arms around vendor invoice management and how you know I mean we all know accounts payable vendor invoice management processes can be and often are difficult to manage I'm seeing my team in the background nodding as we're having this comment like in my head I'm seeing them not right because it is it's such a big job and it's such an important part of business operations and the challenges today are that you know we've got fragmented systems we've got kind of old school processes and and ways that we've always done things we've got more teams involved sometimes than ever before and and the reality of it is that whole end-to-end invoice processing system can be fraught with headaches across the entire organization so we're going to be talking today about how you can think about vendor invoice management differently and what Solutions exist to help streamline that process and take the headaches out of it so with that I love I love conversations like this Richard welcome to the show thank you nice to nice to be here absolutely absolutely so tell us a little bit about yourself if you would I always enjoy kind of hearing you know a little bit of a career path story yeah so um I've been working in IT consulting for um over 30 years now um with sap is the main product was my background um but I've been working in business for about 38 years um in these areas and I've been working in Consulting as well as for um uh you know in business as IT director in trim CEO um tackling various uh Solutions and Technical technological solutions to um issues that the business are having and finding better ways and easier ways and less expensive ways of doing it so um something like invoice processing which really is a cost overhead for most organizations if you can get some cost out of that and make the process smoother easier and easier for all the people involved in the process then I'm really up for doing those sort of things so I've been doing it for many years now not just in voice processing but other Solutions within an organization from from symptomats really awesome you're a problem solver yes absolutely I think that's kind of what I am too so let's talk a little bit let's set the stage a little bit if we can so we know that you know two plus years of navigating a global pandemic has taught us a lot of things that we weren't really thinking about I think things that we knew existed and that could become problematic but a pandemic sort of exacerbated all of that and one of those things was a supply chain issues and you know I mean we had and continue to have supply chain disruption in one way or another and how how does dealing with all things supply chain impact an invoicing solution well the the end game of of any commercial relationship is he's making sure both parties are happy and both parties um are getting some um some benefit and hopefully some money and some profit out of the relationship right and more often than not the you know the the last thing to happen in a in a process is that the payment of the services right and typically um your supplier will suffer if if you're late in making that payment to them um and pandemic has caused various other reasons as to why that might be the case but typically trying to process your invoice for any Goods or any services that your organization has um in that final part he's often forgotten often left uh and and causes um issues with your supplier so with a constrained supply chain you know one of the most important things is becoming you know your preferred customer customers that pay when they say they're going to pay customers that pay you know when when they promise um to do that actually reduces cost it makes you a preferred customer it gives you the opportunity to negotiate better prices but in the in the position where we are with the supply chains being constrained and shipping constraints and all sorts of things we're seeing globally still um suffering from the back of the pandemic um are you still having cost into that market so if you can actually know as a when you're negotiating a price with with your with your with your vendor that you can pay them on time or even take advantage of early payment discounts um then that puts you in a much longer position and even if you're not taking the early payment discounts you know paying when you say you're going to pay and within terms um will make you a much better customer you know we all hate chasing debt we don't like having those ugly conversations even we've just been out to dinner with friends and you've picked up the bill and you know someone says I'll transfer the money to you it's an uncomfortable feeling and you'll be less inclined to offer to pick up the check you know the next time around so it's no different in in commercial business so being a preferred customer um and and resolving those impacts through an easier better way of paying it and it's not normally down to I don't want to pay it on time it's down to I can't and I can't because things go wrong in the process or it's too complicated or it's too manual right no absolutely and I will tell you this I'm I'm one of those people from a business standpoint and from a personal standpoint when I can pay when I can pay in advance when I can play quickly when I can realize a significant benefit financially from you know a reduction in cost to do that I'm I'm all in and so understanding ways that I can streamline processes to help me be able to do that more effectively is attractive I think it's attractive especially right now you know across the globe we have you know we have many things affecting us from a macro economic standpoint right and so when finding ways that you can improve your processes and save money in the in the process I think is compelling absolutely yeah yeah absolutely so hybrid work a global pandemic brought us the reality of hybrid work so what challenges when it comes to the accounts payable process what challenges does hybrid work interject in to this situation yeah well this is probably probably the biggest influencer on on late payment um that's been going on because anybody that has a manual process for processing their invoices and we've all been there we've all worked in organizations it's got that very manual process where you're sitting at your desk and the internal mail comes through and you open up the internal mail and in there is your invoice and you've got a you know stamp the invoice you know put the right cost center on it sign it as you're authorized you know person to say I'm authorized to spend this money and and have this invoice paid and then get it back to accounts payable again um that that's really where a lot of the time and the cost of processing invoices he's taken up you had hybrid work into that and people are not always in the office so you know this mail isn't being posted out so you have either got somebody scanning these invoices and emailing them around um and then getting lost in the same way or they're sitting in somebody's entry waiting for them to come into the office on that day to then pick up the invoice and process it and then if there's a knock-on delay to somebody else in an accounts payable team you know weeks go by before things get approved and signed off very quickly very easily um and this is one of the contributing factors we're seeing to a lot of delays in payment and that puts a strain on the economy everywhere you know up and you have impact everywhere absolutely so let's talk a little bit if we could about they know that there are some hidden costs that we don't often think about kind of within accounts payable would you shed some light on that for me if you would so I've already started to allude to that in in the process of moving things around to get the approval a lot of people think that you know the cost of accounts payables how many people you've got processing the invoices in that team but when you think the consideration of how many people that goes out for approval and who those people are that you're sending those things out to approval and what their role is in your organization you know some of these get up to some fairly senior people you know if if not the you know the CEOs themselves or these organizations depending on the value of money um being being approved um it's all their time involved in you know finding the invoice because somebody's you know saying where's my payment I've not had it and send me out copies of that invoice and people just trying to find the document they need to approve to be able to approve it and follow all the other controls that need to be in place to make sure that the correct person approved it they had the right Authority that is indeed their signature and you think of all of that moving around the business to get that done there's a lot of cost in there that people don't often think about and when they consider the cost of invoice processing you you know can very easily just focus on the finance team that are doing the job as opposed to everybody else that's involved in the whole process right you know the thing about our processes is that when they're cumbersome and you know require us to slug through X number of steps sometimes we do it and we Grumble a little bit and you know we think there's got to be a better way you know what I'm saying um but when we really realize how amazing it can be is when we go through a process that is the way it should be and it's just like boom boom boom I was and and so in a related I'm thinking about I I just actually I just switched phone mobile phone carriers which doesn't have anything to do with processing but I've been with my carrier for a really long time and I felt like they didn't care about me and they weren't taking care of me and they were taking the whatever amount of money I'm spending on a monthly basis completely for granted and you know what's really hard changing providers yeah right in in many things not just for Mobile Care yeah right um but the carrier that I went to made it so easy for me I didn't have to physically even walk into a store I just connected with their team and everything I wanted everything I needed easy solutions easy selections easy understanding everything from the sending me the contract so that I could sign it electronically yesterday and the whole the whole time I'm thinking I've never had a process be this easy this is how it should always be and that's I think what we're talking about here you know it's like when we can convert those things that we're accustomed to being sort of drawn out and I've got to wait on Mitch or Sally or whatever or check your inbox or all those little frustrating steps that add time and effort and energy to the process um I think that when you can magically get rid of that it's like oh my gosh why did it take me so long to realize that this is the way I could have had it right really absolutely it is crazy so with that I would love for you to tell us a little bit about a plexus and um and the capabilities that a plexus offers to clients yeah so um plexus we we basically try and make things that easy and simplify things and make them more straightforward be that from you know implementing full-blown erpc solutions to focus Solutions around a particular pain Point such as the the processing of invoices and we've developed a product that we call Insight the Insight product automates the accounts payable process and it will take that automation as far back as the supplier if they can cope if they can't then there's various steps along the way to still keep it simple for your main users so for example A supplier can send you an electronic copy of your invoice via a PDF for example in an email um our solution can open that email read the invoice make all all of the correct postings that need to happen work out who it needs to be approved by email it across or workflow that invoice to that person for them to approve it and allow them to just visually ex you know view the document check the document and approve it all within minutes of it coming into the organization regardless of where they're based in the world so being able to take something and simplify that um also if you have a paper invoice arrives in the hybrid working still the person within accounts payable can scan that invoice and the same process happens from the minute it's scanned it works out who it's got to go to what the right approval codes are and it's reading all the information that's on that document um putting it all into the right Fields the correct fields that are there and then sometimes it doesn't work smoothly right in which case we make some we've got some really nice easy to use um screens that people can then actually correct the document and then because of the corrections they're making we've got artificial intelligence built into that solution which means they only have to show it once if an invoice arrives from that same supplier again in the same format it already knows and it puts it routes it to the right person already so making things easy learning on the fly as it goes routing them to the right people and then getting those through ready for payment providing all the reporting requirements as well um makes a solution really simple for something that should be simple and easier to process that means you know you can see your cash flow much faster it's already posted into your systems automatically and there's less touching of people you know by people having to um enter that information find that information and and just slog through what can be a very boring job basically yeah yeah well and I think to me that's that's one of the beauties of you know integrating technology Solutions like this into your Tech stack because you know you have a team of people whose time and brain power can be spent doing things that have significant um that add significant value to the business bottom line that aren't these manual repetitive or somewhat boring right somewhere with mind-numbing tasks and then when you've got the you know the AR the AI functionality that's part of it that helps you know with um you know detecting anomalies and making changes so that you don't have to do them in a repetitive way and things like that I mean all of that is a really exciting solution I think yeah absolutely and it that's yeah a lot of value to the um the rest of the business as well because it it also helps reduce um opportunity for fraud um we can automatically do various fraud checks in there as well so you know there's there's other added benefits in that process of being able to read things you wouldn't normally check such as you hear about fraud on email and people you know changing Bank details and things like that in the where the email into into um interjection um we're checking bank details against the previous company's Bank you know the previous invoices and their Master data we hold on the system so it stops those sorts of things happening as well and that happens automatically it's not something that a human has to do oh here's the account number here's the I mean that's really to me what's the beauty of it absolutely yeah and that also you know that that elimination will alert it and alert the right people to the to the to go and check manually and it may be that the vendors change their Bank Account Details I forgot to tell you which is which is fine but it will detect it or pick that up and avoids problems further down the line and again long before the payment is due which means you can still pay on time that's great that's great fixing things on the front end rather than chasing it around why haven't we received your payment those are the worst calls those are the worst calls to make so you touched a little bit on risk mitigation as a benefit but what other kind of savings um might an organization be able to achieve by leveraging an invoice management solution yes I mean typically just even if you just automate it I mean various Studies have been done in the past of having an automated solution and it it cuts the cost of processing and invoice in half um in the time that it takes to work that through so depending on the volume you have you can make some significant savings but some other areas that you may not consider in in a you know the time it takes for senior managers to be approving invoices much quicker um they can approve those through and they spend less time they don't have to look for them they're there in an inbox waiting for them to do it right so that you get the savings there that they alluded to earlier but even something that you may not consider such as your audit everybody has to have an audit every year part of that audit process is making sure you're following approval processes correctly right and you want to work from a you know often your Auditors will go and pull out a paper copy of an invoice and say show me how this one got approved we've turned that on his head we just say to them you know pick any invoice you can see physically you can see an image of that invoice for you know electronically and then you can follow his history of who he approved it when they approved it what time so cutting costs out of your audit processes is another big Advantage um as well as you know reduction in fraud as well oh absolutely absolutely so something that I'm really excited about is a value map calculator [Laughter] tell us about this I think it's anything that I can use to you know that play around with to try to help get to where's the value here I'm always interested so tell us more about it yeah so um it's it's quite straightforward it's basically we have some calculators that will help individual companies understand exactly what they will save um so rather than have a just a generic you know it's half the cost to process you know uh you know automatically than it is manually you know we started again deal in some detail that um works specifically for an organization So within this calculator we pick up you know typical number of invoices that you're going to be processing um the value of those invoices who's in your approval train chain you know their average salary is the time it takes to do the approval of them all of this data goes into our calculator that comes up with a um a savings number that we can pretty much stand by as part of the delivery of the project because yeah even though they're fairly generic um um algorithms that we're working within the calculator it's accurate so when you start to put that sort of information in they're real benefits and real savings that you can expect to achieve as an organization um you know on top of that if you want to get down to some real level of detail we have a value realization team specifically that do this job not just for um invoice management but also other areas and other systems so you know we can go to whichever level an organization wants and then we measure um the value as part of the project so once we've deployed that project and afterwards we can show you what that measurement was as well so being able to accurately forecast the benefit you're going to make crack that forecast and help you realize that that benefit helps pay for these sorts of projects that people want to go in and do to make everybody's life better and show to to your shareholders um exactly you know what savings you're going to do right well and I love the don't take our word for it because so many times when you make a purchase sometimes the software technology approaches it is you know take our word for it this is going to be better but don't take our word for it we will show you yeah in numbers we will show you the value proposition here you need to take a little bit of leap of faith here at the beginning end of this but what we can show you once we get started is surreal concrete savings and I think that's a really impressive part of a value proposition yeah and not not just generic that you know you can say everybody gets you know these are yeah particular to your organization so you know it's it's a very clear path that you can see that you can make I love it I love it so one of my favorite questions to ask is and I don't know in advance that you came prepared to talk about this but do you have a case study or two you know just to uh something that you can share about somebody that started using the the solution and you know kind of some of the some of the benefits they realize anything you can share with us yeah so um I mean we have some information available um on our website that you can actually download some of these but I work with a fashion retailer who um we're not they actually had a level of invoice automation when we we engaged with them okay um but they couldn't process uh 85 of their invoices that were related to the purchase order uh processes so they they managed all of the overhead type costs you know expenses travel fares Hotel bills um and then other you know you know gas bills and so on that come into their organization or marketing costs so those all those un um unplanned sort of prop um costs rather than going to actually cost of goods sold but they couldn't process the ones they had that were processing through for facts it factories to actually make product for them um and through our solution um we you know in particular Advance especially for the fashion industry as well that we can get right the way down to the purchase orders and purchase all the loan items and reduce the cost of processing items that come into your cost of goods sold areas so they you know 85 of their invoices were of that type that they couldn't process electronically um we enable them to do that um along with that we were able to avoid some levels of fraud because they were getting Bank details checked and there's a few companies that have come unstuck with you know um the email interact um interjection I was talking about before right that happens through for all but again the systems are there to stop and check that and then again you know their auditing process was so much better for them as well so they were you know a fashion organizations quite a small company not not massive um and that's more than paid for their project in uh in the cost savings they've had um through that Automation and we actually took that step further for them because the solution is capturing all the additional information one of the benefits that they realized that they weren't expecting was we were able to capture everything along with the invoice so in that particular case we had the invoice itself we had a bit of lading things going on to the vessels we had country of origin certificates that needed to go through for um for Customs that were acquired at the other end and if you take that further if you start getting into luxury goods you have things like sites documents required to bring their riskings into countries and so on um and That Was Then made available throughout whole system not just through accounts payable so then somebody who is in the in the customer services team when they get a call from their customers saying oh we can't find the right paperwork we need to get this through customs here it is so some big benefits from other areas in the way that we just use the tool and make the data available to everybody that could benefit from it so yeah they they made some big benefits from that area and understanding how we could use that terminology to take things further as well as then you know automating other things if you got the invoice and somebody approves the invoice but somebody didn't put the goods receipt in the system that causes a big problem in their Accounts at the end of the day being able to automatically do the goods receipt because the invoice has been approved I must have had the goods that fixes the accounting process again with no manual intervention and nobody else getting involved in it so lots of advantage in the automation when you start to really get under the hood of what's available there absolutely and you know you answered a question that I hadn't yet asked um which was really you know what kind of organization is this solution like this best suited for do I have to be you know an Enterprise level multi-million dollar organization and it sounds like the answer to that is no that the solution can serve across the board regardless of of company size absolutely yeah I mean there's obviously anybody will benefit at some point it's about how long that payback is but um you really don't need to be a big organization to to benefit quite quickly so okay awesome yeah well Richard it has been a delightful conversation as I knew it would be and uh thank you so much for spending time with me and with our audience here today and for our listeners and our viewers I will include um you can find the plexus solution in sap store I'll include a link there I'll include a link to the plexus website so that you can learn more there as well if you would like that and um with that though Richard thank you so much for spending time with me today and for talking about the world of vendor invoice management hopefully for some this will be just the impetus they need to make a change and to start making their their business lives easier with some technology in the in play yeah and thank you very much for having me it's been a wonderful conversation thank you absolutely absolutely well I hope we talk again soon yeah I would love to yeah [Music]