At OnePosting we have talked with hundreds of organizations about helping to improve their outbound invoices. Many say we already have a digital process for some of our customers as we are emailing invoices attached as PDFs. This is an eInvoicing myth as emailing invoices is not a scalable solution if you are looking to grow your business and become more efficient. Here are some of the issues associated with emailing invoices as PDFs.
Email is Not Smart Enough to Deal with Bounce Backs
Invariably when you email you will get bounce backs. This is unavoidable as people will leave companies, be off from work, or they could be having email server issues. Bounce backs come into the email associated with the outbound message. It will take clicking into each email to find out where it bounced back and why. This is a very manual process with no intelligence around which ones to deal with first.
Multiple Emails to the Same Contact Can Cause Issues for the Customer
At the end of the day, you are trying to keep your customers happy so they continue to buy your product or service. We have seen many instances where individual invoices are emailed to the same customer multiple times a day. This causes great frustration for the client dealing with these multiple files. We have seen them ask to revert to paper invoices because it is easier to manage.
Dealing with Customer Invoice Hubs
Many large companies are moving and have moved to using vendor portal to receive invoices. There are many benefits for these companies, but it could mean a lot of extra work for your organization. Your Accounts Receivable invoicing system should be flexible enough to handle submissions to hubs versus manual entry by your team.
Scams Involving Malware and PDFs
There has been an incredible rise in malware delivered as a fake PDF invoice. Some of your customers will not want to click on PDFs, thus rendering your einvoicing system noncompliant.
Reduce Printed Invoices
A poorly designed invoice automation system can limit your organization’s journey to reduce printed invoices. There are costs associated with the finances and effort to maintain invoices. There is also a lag in the time it takes for those invoices to be received.
Analytics and Data
Typical emailing of invoices does not provide any structured data. As an example the OnePosting digital envelope can be used to show your organization who has opened a message, who has approved the invoice, and if the invoice was not delivered. This means the system is doing manual work and providing information to your credit team that allows your organization to get paid faster and with less effort.
If you are interested to see how OnePosting can help your organization with smarter invoicing please schedule a meeting with our team.
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