Initially designed to rid corporate America’s accounts payable departments of the burgeoning number of small-dollar invoices, p-cards are now being used by innovative companies for a lot more. Speaking at IOMA’s Accounts Payable Conference and Expo, three savvy professionals revealed the strategies being used at their companies to streamline operations through expanded use of p-cards.
Get ready to hear a lot about a brand new concept—Enterprise Spend Management (ESM). It’s part of the procure-to-pay cycle, and proponents of squeezing the last cent out of the process are finally realizing that accounts payable plays a vital role in this process. Speaking at the National Association of Purchasing and Payables annual conference, TrinTime’s CEO, Kathy Marshall, explained to the group why ESM will become even more important to corporate America in the near future.
One of the best ways to improve departmental productivity is to clear associates’ desks of their small-dollar invoices overflow. The amount of effort needed to process these invoices is not much less than that required on much larger invoices, but the return is much less.
Don’t you love those vendors who send invoices with no identifying information as to who ordered the goods or whether there was an associated purchase order? While a small percentage of these invoices are fraudulent, most are from legitimate suppliers who simply have poor billing policies. These policies translate into more work for the accounts payable departments that receive these poorly formatted invoices. A growing number of companies are drawing a line in the sand by refusing to process invoices lacking certain basic data.
Proponents of e-billing now come from companies of all sizes, and EDI is no longer the only way to share invoices electronically. In the past, large companies and those that did business with them were the main supporters of electronic billing, and the term “electronic billing” was synonymous with EDI. Data from the credit profession itself reveals this seismic shift in attitudes and use through a recent IOMA survey in which respondents talked about their use of electronic billing, their future plans for it, and any problems they had encountered with it.
Initially designed to rid corporate America’s accounts payable departments of the burgeoning number
of small-dollar invoices, p-cards are now being used by innovative companies for a lot more. Speaking at
IOMA’s Accounts Payable Conference and Expo, three savvy professionals revealed the strategies being
used at their companies to streamline operations through expanded use of p-cards.
Get ready to hear a lot about a brand new concept—Enterprise Spend Management (ESM). It’s part
of the procure-to-pay cycle, and proponents of squeezing the last cent out of the process are finally realizing
that accounts payable plays a vital role in this process.
One of the best ways to improve departmental productivity is to clear associates’ desks of their small-dollar
invoices overflow. The amount of effort needed to process these invoices is not much less than that
required on much larger invoices, but the return is much less. Accounts payable managers most adept at
attacking this problem rely on the following five approaches.
Proponents of e-billing now come from companies of all sizes, and EDI is no longer the only way to
share invoices electronically. In the past, large companies and those that did business with them were the
main supporters of electronic billing, and the term “electronic billing” was synonymous with EDI. Data
from the credit profession itself reveals this seismic shift in attitudes and use through a recent IOMA
survey in which respondents talked about their use of electronic billing, their future plans for it, and any
problems they had encountered with it.
Don’t you love those vendors who send invoices with no identifying information as to who ordered
the goods or whether there was an associated purchase order? While a small percentage of these invoices
are fraudulent, most are from legitimate suppliers who simply have poor billing policies. These policies
translate into more work for the accounts payable departments that receive these poorly formatted invoices.
A growing number of companies are drawing a line in the sand by refusing to process invoices
lacking certain basic data.
2009
