14 Business Leaders Discuss Transitioning to Invoice Automation (And the Benefits)

Automating your invoice processing can drastically reduce costs while freeing up loads of time for your team to focus on critical tasks. And that’s just a fraction of the benefits

Reducing late payments, taking advantage of discounts (bulk order, order consolidation, and early payment), eliminating the paper trail, improving transparency and efficiency across your supply chain, the list goes on and on.

If that’s the case, then why do growing businesses still cling to manual invoice processing?

The truth is that change can be scary.

Many businesses don’t know what to expect when they switch to a new system. As a result, many postpone their transition to invoice automation.

To give you peace of mind, we spoke with leaders at several businesses about their experiences with transitioning to invoice automation.

Here’s what they had to say about their experiences and the benefits.

7 Business Leaders Share Their Experience Transitioning to Invoice Automation

Wondering what it’s like to transition from a manual invoicing process to an automated one? These business leaders share their personal experiences with the process.

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Stephen Curry, CEO of CocoSign

CocoSign is a renowned secure E-Sign service provider that helps businesses automate their paperwork workflow through a programmable logic signing system.

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At Cocosign, our company’s billing system wasn’t compatible with the automation software we wanted to use. Our company’s accounting system didn’t allow for automation and/or reconciliation of data files and reports. And that made it difficult for us to monitor our accounts receivable monthly activity levels by invoice number, invoice date range, or dollar amount.

Our previous system was not user-friendly. We were spending countless hours manually searching for invoices and entering data into a spreadsheet template. With invoice automation, we found a solution that is more efficient and cost-effective. It has saved us a huge amount of time, making our work easier and less stressful.

The old system was also inefficient because it required too many resources to maintain. So, we left it in order to find a more cost-efficient solution that would allow us to save time on tedious tasks like searching for invoices.

In our experience, implementing an automated invoicing process has been a huge benefit for our organization. We have seen a drastic increase in the efficiency of the billing process. This has meant fewer errors and less time spent on tasks that are not core to our business.

Automation is undoubtedly a boon for our organization as we have to invoice customers frequently. It saves time and money while ensuring accuracy in passing on information such as customer name spelling or address details. Moreover, it automatically checks for errors and can send automated alerts before processing the invoice to reduce errors during this final stage.

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Tanner Arnold, President & CEO of Revelation Machinery

We work with manufacturing clients, helping them buy and sell two classifications of equipment: Fabrication equipment and CNC equipment.

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Your natural focus as a business is on the bottom line. Even so, there could be a number of different variables that serve as performance indicators for your company.

Invoice automation will boost your profitability simply because you will have more time to focus on other duties and your invoicing process will be more efficient.

You should, however, consider the underlying metrics that may influence your profitability. An automated invoicing software, for example, can display real-time information such as monthly recurring revenue and client lifetime value.

You may then make quick decisions based on this information to keep your business flourishing.

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Harriet Chan, Co-Founder and Marketing Director of CocoSign

CocoFinder provides in-depth information on a person, including their photos, address, criminal history, property holdings, relatives, and more.

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Onboarding was the toughest part of the invoice automation process for our organization.

Compared with other migration instances that we’ve undergone before, invoice automation involved incorporating multiple unique profiles into our system to ensure a seamless sync of information across all platforms.

Our transition to automated invoices would have happened much sooner. However, it coincided with our shift to remote work. As a result, it had to be part of our second phase of process automation and priority as well.

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Olivia Tan, tech expert and a Co-founder of Cocofax

CocoFax is an all-in-one online fax solution provider dedicated to smarter business communications. We aim to help businesses go greener, smarter, and quicker.

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The high cost of automating invoices made us fear getting [invoice automation] at first, but we experienced a significant decrease in overall costs in the end.

We needed a simplified process for managing our accounts. Our large volume of invoices needed to be processed automatically because there was an increase in manual errors. We also needed something that reduced our operating costs. Invoice automation proved to be the right solution.

In the end, the experience of transitioning from manual invoice to automated invoice was smooth. We got to see how automated invoices are much better than manual ones.

Overall, we reduced our processing time. And time-saving is directly proportional to saving. Errors made while processing our invoice manually were also reduced. Our data collection improved because the invoice automation process keeps all the data intact. Ultimately, we increased transparency in purchasing as well.

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Daniela Sawyer, Founder of FindPeopleFast.net

FindPeopleFast helps users find people by finding the complete biographical data to verify the people you search online and their public records.

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Most of the time, purchase requisitions take a lot of time to move through an organization’s complicated approval hierarchy. Manual invoice management typically means delayed payments and compliance issues.

By going digital, invoice handling becomes buttery smooth, with characteristics ranging from touch-free auto-approval of standard low-value invoices to extended functionality through integration with finance and accounting tools.

We envisioned and shared positive outcomes by using invoice automation. The earpiece system we use typically handles purchase orders, invoices, payments, and process orders. Invoice automation also cuts down on our approval cycle time by removing redundant steps in the process. As a result, our team has more time for other tasks.

Automating your procurement is not only a great choice, but it has become a necessity.

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Steven Walker, CEO of Spylix

Spylix is committed to facilitating legal parental and employee monitoring services.

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I was in charge of transitioning our business to invoice automation. Our organization spent a lot of time filing manual invoices. As a result, many invoices had mistakes that we needed to correct, wasting even more time.

There were 2 to 3 major barriers to our transition at first. Senior members weren’t ready to support or implement the change. They had anxiety around the costs associated with it. We also experienced some pushback from clients who did not support it.

After speaking with the team about the benefits, they agreed that we should make the switch. Specifically, they saw the value in error reduction and the cost/savings benefit from not needing employees to manually process invoices.

Having successfully implemented invoice automation, we’re not looking at other workflows to automate as well.

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Hanah Alexander, Senior Partner at Today Testing

We perform deep dive research on business software with the aim of helping small business owners find the right products for their needs.

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For a few years, I handled all the invoicing manually for our company. I knew there were benefits to automated invoicing that could be realized. But, I avoided it for quite some time.

Why? Well, I thought it would be too expensive and time-consuming to learn. However, I eventually took the leap, and those fears were quickly put to rest.

One of the biggest benefits of automated invoicing is that it can actually save you a lot of time.

With a system that automatically generates invoices and tracks payments, I spend far less time on administrative tasks and could focus more on growing my business.

Additionally, automated invoicing helped us avoid late payments and keep our contractors happy. It also helped us get paid faster by ensuring bills were sent out to customers on time.

As for the costs involved, it turns out automating your invoicing can actually save money. We reduced our invoicing errors and late fees while simultaneously taking advantage of more discounts that our vendors offered.

7 Business Leaders Explain the Benefits of Invoice Automation

Invoice automation offers an incredible range of benefits for growing businesses. These leaders share how their businesses benefited from automating the invoicing process.

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Veronica Miller, Marketing Expert at VPNoverview

VPNOverview covers all topics on VPNs, online privacy, internet security, and internet freedom.

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Different clients may pay different costs for your services depending on your pricing plan, whether you employ pricing tiers, and how you sell your services.

You may add a self-service element to whatever you sell by employing automated invoicing. Afterward, you can leave it to the technology to generate the correct invoice, at the correct value, for each customer.

This feature is also useful for processing incoming invoices. For example, if you're using AI to figure out how much money you owe a vendor, you don't need a fixed-price contract.

Suppose you're utilizing a pay-per-use service. You don't have to bother about setting up a regular payment amount because the AI will select the relevant monthly payment.

Of course, AI can detect irregularities in payment quantities, guaranteeing you don't get caught off guard!

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Marc Stitt, Chief Marketing Officer of FMX

FMX helps organizations manage work orders, plan preventive maintenance, manage assets and inventory usage, track staff and equipment performance, schedule events, and more

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Invoicing processing automation combined with machine learning can help your employees achieve more in a shorter period of time. It also has a positive side effect: it reduces the need to hire more team members.

Increasing the size of your team is an expensive endeavor. First and foremost, you'll need to figure out how much it will cost to hire new employees. Following that, you'll need to devote some time to find the best fit for your company.

Using invoice processing automation software can alleviate some of the stress associated with hiring. Adding staff to the accounts payable team as soon as possible is not something you need to be worried about. Your employees will be able to deal with the increased volume much more smoothly.

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Jamie Opalchuk, CEO & Founder of HostPapa

HostPapa provides cloud-based web hosting with 24-7 award-winning multi-lingual customer support provided by a team of experts. We have been featured in Profit 500 Magazine.

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Human beings, as you are aware, are prone to making mistakes. Invoice processing mistakes are usually caused by manual operations, such as data input services (which are relatively common in the industry).

This can cause plenty of issues for your company and cause it to take a financial hit. It’s possible that you may pay the wrong amount or pay on the wrong date. More so, a mistake in invoicing could result in a late payment or even the loss of invoices.

Accuracy can be improved with invoice processing services that use machine learning technology. Because of this, you will spend less time correcting invoicing problems, and you'll also minimize the number of inspections you need to reissue as a result.

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Sumit Bansal, Founder and CEO of TrumpExcel

I am a Tech Expert, Microsoft Excel MVP, and have been awarded the prestigious "Excel MVP Award" by Microsoft for my contributions in sharing my Excel knowledge and helping people.

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Manual invoice processing might take anywhere between 20 and 21 days. The use of automation ensures that invoices are processed at a faster rate. You'll also be able to cut down on the amount of time your employees spend on invoices each day.

With the help of invoice processing automation software, you can reduce this time to 3 or 4 days. When using machine learning invoice processing services, the time it takes to complete a task is reduced even further. It's easy to see how automation can save you time.

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Mark Valderrama, CEO & Founder of Aquarium Store Depot

Aquarium Store Depot offers a limited selection of vetted products to make it simply the aquarium hobby so beginners can thrive.

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Automatic invoice processing enables finance teams and accounts payable departments to manage their budgets and cash flows more effectively as part of a broader, more holistic approach to AP automation.

This is because invoice automation increases end-to-end visibility, allowing spend commitments to be handled more effectively in accordance with established business standards.

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James Angel, Co-Founder of DYL

DYL is an all-in-one business growth tool designed with Email Campaigns, Lead Generation, and Telemarketing.

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Automated invoice processing extracts data straight from invoices and feeds it in real-time to the accounts payable system. This paperless procedure is enhanced by machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies. Additionally, bills are handled promptly, removing bottlenecks and improving invoice processing operations.

Another way that automated invoice processing improves productivity is by capturing early payment discounts and avoiding late payments, which may wreak havoc on supplier relationships.

See how we've helped our clients improve their businesses and get insane ROIs by checking out our case studies below.

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