AP Invoice Automation

Does your company still receive paper invoices that are manually routed for approval or scanned/emailed to approvers? Or does your organization have an automated routing solution in place yet still feels like much of the employee’s time is spent on the invoicing process? You are not alone; a high percentage of construction companies today spend a significant amount of financial and human resources on this process. It is estimated that accounts payable personnel can spend up to 60-80% of their time on this task and Burger Consulting Group (BCG) often sees companies add administrative headcount to help manage the payables. While this can be effective to some extent, this approach is also a costly solution. A recent client who is a specialty contractor with over $1B in revenues has 35 personnel dedicated to AP functions, much of it handling invoices.

Invoice automation is not always at the forefront of a contractor’s priority list. Burger Consulting Group highly recommends companies to evaluate their AP processes and consider automation. In our experience of working directly with clients, having the right solution in place resulted in a significant reduction of costs associated with invoice processing as well as improved controls. Invoice automation eliminates 95% of manual tasks, creating process efficiencies, and cost savings. There are several approaches possible from using the invoice routing function within your ERP solution, to acquiring a third-party invoice processing solution with integration into your ERP AP application. Either approach is preferable to scanning, routing, filing, following up, asking for duplicates, updating spreadsheets, and fielding vendor calls. All common functions in the absence of an automated invoice processing solution.

Amanda Kalcic has assisted three large contractors in the last 18 months with HRIS selections. The trend of companies seeking to implement a full-scale HR solution continues to build in…