How much can eInvoicing save you?

There have been many studies over the years to understand the costs of manually processing invoices.  They show that, based on the average time spent on physically handling each invoice and the cost of labour and exception handling , a business can expect to pay on average $25 to $30  to process an invoice from a supplier.

The cost to your business will vary depending on your processing practices, and those processes can be surprisingly convoluted.  Acume has worked with a client whose best-case process for an inbound invoice saw 13 people handle each one until it was posted for payment, and that was for an invoice that was neither queried nor needed any other special follow-up.  This is not an outlier for many corporates.

eInvoicing cuts these costs on average by at least 60 percent because it supplies source invoice data from the supplier directly into your accounts payable workflow removing any error related follow up.

Want to figure out the figures for your own organisation?  The Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment has an ROI calculator on its eInvoicing website that assumes that average cost of a paper invoice is $25.67, a PDF invoice $23.01 and an eInvoice $7.63.  The calculator can be modelled to match your business profile.  The numbers are compelling.  If you take a business processing 10,000 invoices per annum (833 per month) and only five percent of its suppliers use eInvoicing, the saving is $16,710 per year.  If 60 percent of your invoices are eInvoices, the savings grow to $200,520.

The Australian Tax Office has rounded the numbers to $9.00 for an eInvoice and $30.00 for a PDF or paper invoice.  This make sense as with a great number of larger business the internal compliance and processing on average passes through more touch points. 

The savings are compelling and are one of the reasons the New Zealand and Australian governments have got behind eInvoicing and have adopted the PEPPOL standard in both jurisdictions, with an estimated 40 billion in savings estimated by business over the next 10 years

Acume is an accounts payable, accounts receivable automation platform that has been designed around the Peppol eInvoicing standard.   Acume includes configurable workflows that enable it to scale for small to mediums up to Enterprise users.