Best Practice for Invoice Receipt

Question: To ensure best practice invoice processing, should we expect to receive EDI, E Invoice Networks or Paper Invoices?
Answer: YES

For most large corporations, a best practice scenario includes the ability to receive invoices from all sources.

EDI is a common form of invoice receipt for major suppliers delivering high number of invoices for selected goods and / or services. While this technology has been in place for several years it is a proven technology.

E Invoicing Networks or Electronic Invoice Presentment and Payment (EIPP) has been around for several years with some success but recent economic downturn has driven a renewed interest in this as a cost reduction effort. The critical success factor of getting suppliers to subscribe to the networks has significantly improved.

Paper still remains as the primary source for invoice receipt. The utilization of OCR to extract the meta data from the paper invoices has shown dramatic increases as corporations strive for straight through processing similar to that provide by EDI. Most large corporations are have either upgrading their imaging solutions or for those that have not implemented image many ore planning on implementing within the next year.

One important consideration, regardless of the source, invoice meta data often contains exceptions. Where practical, images of the invoice should be linked to the SAP invoice process to facilitate best practice resolution.

With SAP Invoice Management, varying source meta data is not an issue. Visibility of the image during processing and linkage to the invoice document is standard.

So…what is the best source of meta data…ALL!

See SAP EcoHub for more on SAP AP Optimization: