85% of UK Businesses Vote for a Paperless Office to Boost Accounts Payable Efficiency and Deliver Cost Savings

85% of companies believe automated invoice processing boosts efficiency
- 73% of companies say automation will reduce invoice processing costs

Boosting efficiency and cutting processing costs are the key drivers for businesses wanting to improve their accounts payable (AP) processes, according to a new survey from ITESOFT, the leading developer of electronic document capture and automated invoice processing solutions.

ITESOFT's email survey of finance managers and senior AP staff in UK public and private sector companies, showed that automation benefits such as reducing purchase-to-pay times and ensuring regulatory compliance were secondary compared with efficiency gains and cost reductions.

When asked to name the top three pressures impacting their need to improve AP processes, 85% of respondents cited improving efficiency, with 73% stating reductions in invoice processing costs.

44% wanted to reduce the purchase-to-pay times thereby capturing early payment rebates and avoiding late-payment penalties, while just 22% named regulatory compliance as a driver.

The survey also revealed the three biggest causes of invoice queries in business, which clearly show the link between efficiency gains and reducing reliance on paper-based AP processing. Although quantity or price discrepancies was named as the biggest cause of queries by 65% of respondents, incomplete documentation (57%) and lack of purchase order (56%) scored highly, with no Goods Receipt Notes scoring 32%.

Although around half of the organisations surveyed (53%) did not yet have in place an accounts payable or supplier invoice automation solution, just under two thirds of them were actively looking to automate their accounts payable activity in the near future, or had already taken steps to implement a solution.

Bill Webb, UK Managing Director at ITESOFT said: “The survey findings make a compelling case for deploying automation, with the majority of UK businesses looking to this technology to improve their accounts payable and invoicing processing performance.

“By automating core business processes such as accounts payable, which are traditionally extremely paper- and labour-intensive, organisations can significantly streamline the handling and processing of supplier invoices. As well as achieving efficiency gains and cost savings, companies can get additional benefits such as early payment discounts and avoiding late-payment penalties.”

ITESOFT
www.itesoft.com
Context Public Relations
Peak View, King Edward Street, Macclesfield, Cheshire, SK10 1AQ
www.contextpr.co.uk

Founded in 1984, ITESOFT is a European software company specialised in developing automatic information flow processing solutions. The company has offices in Germany (ITESOFT Deutschland GmbH, Hamburg), in the UK (ITESOFT UK Ltd, Farnham) and in France (Headquarters: Aimargues (30); Paris: ITESOFT).

With unique know-how in character and shape recognition technologies, ITESOFT solutions are used by over 600 customers throughout Europe in a wide range of business sectors, including: Direct Sales, Finance, Government, Industry, Insurance, Mail Order Sales, Retirement, Services, Social Security/Healthcare, and more. These solutions handle more than a billion documents per year, optimising internal business processes and reducing costs while increasing document handling speed and improving data reliability.

Today, ITESOFT is the French market leader for capturing and processing documents electronically, and is a major European-wide player.

Group turnover, 2006: 16.5 M€ n Group staff, 2006: 149 people

ITESOFT offers a complete, integrated, and flexible line of software solutions for electronically capturing and automatically processing and handling all documents flowing into companies: correspondence, forms (orders, slips), invoices, and payments (checks, bank drafts, etc.). The company’s software product line is based on three core products:

§ ITESOFT.FreeMind dedicated to capturing and automatically processing documents. Specific modules include:
o ITESOFT.FreeMind Enterprise to capture, sort, and distribute incoming document flows
o ITESOFT.FreeMind for Business to handle all business flows
o ITESOFT.FreeMind for Invoices to handle supplier invoices
o ITESOFT.FreeMind for Orders to handle BtoB order forms
§ ITESOFT.Share dedicated to electronic content management and workflow
§ ITESOFT.iSpid dedicated to automatic payment processing

These solutions offer advanced, seamless integrations with the market’s leading ERP systems (BaaN, CODA, Infor, JD Edwards, Oracle, PeopleSoft, Qualiac, SAP®, etc.).

ITESOFT’s mission is to “Develop the technologies and solutions that offer the best levels of productivity and reliability for capturing, processing and managing information flows”.

This release was published on openPR.