Receiving an incorrect invoice, which therefore does not meet your company's requirements and then has to be returned to the sender. It is a daily source of annoyance in many companies. Examples of inaccuracies abound: missing payment information, order or invoice number, incomplete listing of amounts or incorrect attribution.
The time-consumingmanual process in the event of an erroneous invoice
The process of returning that erroneous invoice contains many successive manual actions that are often performed by different people. This in turn has the effect of substantially increasing the likelihood of new errors.
Practice: first, the (order) invoice is removed from the application to prevent further processing. The employee prints the document or saves it digitally and forwards it to the appropriate colleague or department. Then the contact details of the relevant supplier are added and then an e-mail is sent explaining the reasons for return/rejection. Sometimes the original document is also attached to the e-mail and these details are again recorded in a return register. And this is only about a single erroneous invoice.
Choose smarter and faster
Not surprisingly, integrating all these process steps within one system is many times more efficient. Smart integration lowers turnaround time, reduces the chance of errors and contributes to a professional image to your clients. With software from Kofax or Basware, the return of an incorrect invoice is fully automatic.
Here's how it works:
The image of the (order) invoice and extracted data are already present. The supplier's e-mail address is most likely also available througha link to P2P software or the financial system. The application can offer the possibility to present predefined return reasons as a selection or make fields available for free input. The document can then be sent to another person for approval. Here all criteria are actually already filled in and preprocessed. After initialization, the system automatically generates an e-mail with the reasons for return to the supplier's e-mail address including the attachment. Optionally, all extracted data can be sent to a return registration system.
Keep time
That way you stop misery at the front end of the process, even before the incorrect invoice consumes time, money and energy from your internal organization. Switching to such a system is easier than it may seem, even if you already have Kofax or Basware software in place but are not yet using it for this process. Get in touch. We would be happy to tell you more about it.
