Tim Robertson

GM and other North American automakers get a clunker rating for their supplier relationships. Photo credit – https://flic.kr/p/bv3RsA

The most recent North American Automotive – Tier 1 Supplier Working Relations Index Study has shed some light on the financial implications of having good supplier relationships. Can accounts payable automation help?

The study examined the automotive industry and how its suppliers view the major car manufacturers and their relationships…something that can be relevant to all industries.

General Motors, Ford, Nissan and FCA missed out on a total of $2 billion because of poor relationships with their suppliers. The author of the study found two main factors that affected this relationship.  The first had to do with how contracts are honoured and if the purchasing department worked to improve relations (procurement). The second related to buyers, and how they were active in resolving issues.

From the article:

This study highlights the importance and the tangible benefits of treating your suppliers fairly and honestly as valued partners. This may sound obvious, but with the problem of late payments continuing to plague SMEs in many countries, it’s clearly something that some buyers are not taking on board.

A key element of this relationship is timely payment, something that e-invoicing technology from Palette can help with by automating and speeding up the payment process. We have worked with a number of suppliers in the transport industry – including automotive components supplier US Farathane – to help them improve their purchase-to-payment processes and relationships with buyers. After all, business is all about successful and long-lasting relationships.”

The demand for accounts payable automation and accounts payable automation software is growing, as shown by sales growth of the PaletteArena purchase to pay platform, which has seen a 25% increase in sales in 2015 so far (see the article here). The accounts payable p2p cycle is being transformed by software that can match purchase orders and contracts to invoices, and increased use of electronic invoicing to reduce the costs of handling paper.

See the full article on the Palette blog here.

EchoVera has released NetSuite Connect, an integration module that allows PaletteArena to integrate seamlessly with the world’s fastest growing financial management system. It uses the Celigo Integrator – PRLog.com has press release with all of the details, here is a snippet from the release:

“EchoVera has released EchoVera NetSuite Connect, an integration module that integrates NetSuite with PaletteArena, one of the leading Purchase to Pay platforms. Utilizing the Celigo Integrator, EchoVera has made it possible for enterprises to take advantage of PaletteArena’s electronic invoicing and AP automation features while integrating with NetSuite, the world’s fastest growing financial management system.”

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EchoVera has announced that their Intelligent OCR solution, their electronic invoicing platform, and their accounts payable automation suite called ASAP, integrate completely with NetSuite.

Each of the solutions support finance departments in reducing paperwork, increasing efficiency, and cutting the costs of handling supplier invoices. Invoice data capture software is used to handle paper invoices, including PDFs that are scans of paper invoices. Electronic invoicing software is employed to process PDF invoices that are generated from a system like NetSuite. And Purchase to Pay automation is used to workflow the invoice data for coding and approval.

Find out more about AP Automation for NetSuite.

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Intelligent OCR is an Intelligent Document Recognition OCR Software that automates the capture of PDFs that have been sent directly from a suppliers accounting system, or PDFs that are scans of paper invoices the supplier has issued.

Find out more about Intelligent OCR for NetSuite.

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The Intelligent OCR solution takes a PDF or multiple page PDF document invoice sent directly from a supplier and turns the information into data.

The ASAP automation solution streamlines all of an organization’s business flows, invoices, contracts, purchase orders and employee expenses. It’s a software service in the cloud that allows managers to code and approve supplier invoices quickly, boosting efficiency and providing  executives with more visibility into where their payables stand at any time, 24/7.

Most OCR invoice software on the market today can be relied upon to locate data on an invoice and enter it into the appropriate field according to a user’s preferences. Even though this is a step up in the automation of invoice capture, it is still time consuming to go through every invoice that needs to be scanned and designate the proper placement of the data.

Intelligent OCR uses context to locate the required data, and compensates for poor quality images and misspellings, matching the data against internal sources. While this feature is available in some products, Intelligent OCR allows you to search most typical values from any document using a built-in Intelli-Tag database.

This additional feature allows you speed up your data capture applications without document templates. As well, you can create and/or customize your own Intelli-Tag database to improve your documents recognition or adapt to specific applications.

Intelligent OCR is capable of automatically and intuitively detecting/learning unique vendor invoices based on their respective layouts, allowing the scanning and/or importing of data from emailed or paper invoices with more efficiency. Intelligent OCR also intuitively performs field mapping and data collection.

• Scans paper invoices (from your browser), capturing header and line item invoice fields
• Easy-to-use and intuitive, browser-based interface
• Gets high marks for ease of use and an intuitive interface
• 95% accuracy rates
• Integrates seamlessly with your ERP

Intelligent OCR captures invoice data from electronic document formats such as PDF, XML, EDI, Word, TIFF, JPG, HTML and more. Our data capture service is free for suppliers and they incur no cost to send invoices to your Accounts Payable system. The process is very straightforward – they simply send their invoices to a designated email account.

Book a demo of Intelligent OCR.

Royal Ravintoloihin is the largest private corporate entity in Finland. The company includes of the parent company of Royal Restaurants Oy and its subsidiaries Oy Union Hotels and Konseptiravintolat Oy. The group contains of 33 restaurants in 26 locations, 15 Hanko Sushi restaurants and 1 Hotel across Finland. The Palette products bought by Royal Ravintoloihin will be implemented in all locations.

E-invoicing has been steadily growing worldwide over the last few years, and it looks like its growth could accelerate even further this year with the European Union looking to make e-invoicing mandatory for government procurement. The U.S Government has also mandated e-invoicing for government departments in order to lower processing costs and save an expected $450m.

According to research from e-invoicing consultancy and market analyst Billentis, a company can save up to nearly 80% by implementing automated invoicing processes.

But cost reduction is not the only reason why more and more governments and businesses are switching from paper to electronic invoicing. E-invoicing helps organisations to improve and streamline their financial operations, which is vital in today’s fast-paced and international business environment. It also makes it easier for them to track invoices, which prevents the risks of fraud and of invoices going missing.

E-invoicing technology enables faster, easier and safer payments between organisations, while achieving significant cost savings. With more and more companies and government departments set to adopt the technology, this will create greater collaboration between international business partners and more efficient international commerce.