According to the research, 31 percent of PO-backed invoices require expensive manual rework before payment can be approved. The survey has also revealed that the top-three repercussions of this state of affairs are late payments, increased operating costs and unhappy suppliers. For companies processing around 350,000 invoices annually (the average volume across survey respondents), exceptions were found to cause 32 percent of late payments, 36 percent of supplier phone calls, and require 160,000 man hours a year across the enterprise to resolve them - equivalent to 79 full-time employees.
The key sources of exceptions were revealed to include price or quantity discrepancies, no valid purchase order, or goods not received. And despite these problems, only 43 percent of survey participants have formal tracking methods.
According to the research, 85 percent of polled professionals agree on the fact that eliminating exceptions would be one of the most effective ways to cut costs for Accounts Payable (AP).
The survey was carried out by UK-based global B2B e-invoicing network operator OB10 in partnership with sharedserviceslink.com.
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