Basware solutions for purchase-to-pay

Digital transformation of purchase to pay

Without automation, purchase to pay is often fragmented and cluttered. The result: unnecessarily tied up working capital and retrospective corrections. With a data-driven P2P system, you get a grip on purchasing and accounts payable and proactively manage cash.

• Reduce operational costs

  Organizing and automating procurement (indirect spend) and invoice processing (both direct and indirect spend) centrally can greatly reduce the operational costs of these processes.

  Automation of the p2p process often starts with accounts payable. The process of manually receiving invoices, coding them, validating them, having them approved by budget holders and submitting them for payment is replaced by a process of automatic invoice recognition, automatic coding and semi-automatic approval or fully automatic matching against purchase orders, for example.

  Suppliers are automatically notified of the status of invoices they have sent.

• Strengthen relationships with suppliers

  Negotiate favorable price and delivery arrangements

  When visibility into order and invoice flows is gained, they can easily be linked to the supplier base. For direct spend this will be clear, but for the long-tail to suppliers where stuff for maintaining company premises, office supplies and marketing materials is purchased, the challenge is greater. When orders and invoices are managed centrally, the supplier base can be rationalized and pricing and delivery arrangements can be made with preferred suppliers.

  Take advantage of early payment discounts

  Automating the receipt and processing of incoming invoices reduces turnaround time and allows a supplier to be paid more quickly. This good behavior naturally calls for a reward. A large number of companies in the Netherlands suffer from invoices that are paid late. To encourage buyers to pay earlier, many suppliers offer discounts for early payment of invoices. A payment discount of 1 percent is not unusual; 2 percent is also common. Research by Forrester shows that companies with an annual spend of 300 million euros over a three-year period miss out on an average of about 400,000 euros in payment discounts.

• Improve auditability

  By paying suppliers on time and thwarting fraudsters, you are already demonstrating good behavior. And that data-driven working reduces the use of paper is, of course, obvious. But data-driven working also provides transparency and traceability of work.

• Prevent invoice fraud

  A PDF or XML invoice passes through several email servers of which only about 50% are encrypted. On every other server, criminals can intercept invoices, modify them with their own bank account numbers and forward them. Through address spoofing, it is even possible to send an email on behalf of someone else. Criminals can also sling a phantom invoice into the market where the value is only a few hundred euros so that there is little manual check with recipients and payment is usually automatic. Companies and institutions can prevent this with automated control mechanisms on XML invoices (or paper or PDF invoices converted to XML). The content of an XML invoice is then compared with the supplier data as known to the customer. If the combination of name, VAT number and IBAN on the invoice does not match the data in the system, an invoice sent by criminals with a modified IBAN will automatically fall out.