Contributed article by Rachel Griffiths, Business Process Consultant at Canon UK
In Europe’s challenging and competitive markets, it’s essential for businesses to investigate how they can boost cost effectiveness, process efficiency and improve stakeholder relationships. Whatever the current climate, it’s hugely beneficial to a company’s balance sheet to be efficient, responsive and lean.
Despite a period of relative stability over the last year, very low levels of economic growth, combined with concerns relating to a possible (and now confirmed) Brexit as well as the destabilising events across Europe, have meant that the background for most organisations has remained challenging. So during the first three months of this year we took an in-depth look at how this was affecting the UK’s purchase to pay departments, the challenges they faced and their strategies for the future.
Some organisations get it. They fully recognise the potential e-invoicing has to transform their business. Others, quite simply, don’t. Those in the second camp see e-invoicing only as a potentially faster way of paying suppliers, but with added implementation and process change costs, and anyway they're quite happy the way things are – so push it to one side.
Guest article by Stephen Carter, Head of e-Invoicing, Basware UK
It is clear that e-invoicing is an essential part of an efficient financial supply chain. But it isn’t simply a matter of sellers emailing invoices to buyers as PDFs – it’s far more. The real public sector savings come from the removal of paper and PDFs from the whole process – from ordering through to invoice capture and processing, approval and posting – even payments. This is an important distinction to make, especially if the UK public sector are to achieve the estimated £2bn in cashable efficiency savings.
