It depends on a number of factors, including:
1. How an organization calculates its cost per invoice: Some organizations see their cost per invoice as the total annual AP budget divided by the total annual number of invoices processed. This disregards corporate overhead, as well as the costs of work performed in other departments in order to approve and pay invoices.
2. The scope of service required: the costs to open, prep, image and OCR an invoice are lower than those same costs plus an AP Automation application. Or for those companies who want to automatically match invoices PO's and goods receipts, the scope of service is broader (ie. costlier, given the amount of data to be captured) than for companies who have no PO matching and instead use workflow to approve invoices.
But back to the question. Yes, it is possible. And its being done today.
2 comments:
Hi Paul,
I am late to join this discussion but it has my interest. Many people that I talk to ask me: what is the "National Average" cost to process a piece of paper (usually they mean an invoice but it could also mean a purchase order). Do you have any numbers you can share or stats? That is helpful information when presenting a case to upper management. While some companies may have their act together in processing paper and are on the low side (or below), others have not resolved these issues and are on the high side.
Thank you.
Bill
Bill - there are some really good, un-biased, studies by Aberdeen and others that all roughly fall in the same place: fully optimized processes have an all-in cost of ~2.50 USD, while the laggards can run all-in costs > ~$16 USD. When we present business cases, pointing to such third-party data always helps.
Paul
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