Every day, companies evaluate and make decisions to operate more efficiently and increase profitability. Evaluating those decisions can be a long, challenging process. One area of opportunity for many oil & gas companies to realize greater efficiency is through accounts payable automation. While digitization of your invoice process promises savings, you might be curious about how big of an impact it would have on your organization.
If you have doubts of how helpful accounts payable automation would be for your company, here are some quick facts:
- Companies that process invoices manually report an error rate of 4 percent.
- 62 percent of invoice processing costs represent staff labor.
- Only 30 percent of companies use automatic capture to help with AP invoice processing.
- 50 percent of early payment discounts go unobtained, as companies struggle to execute payment in time.
- Only 32 percent of companies monitor and analyze the performance of their AP department.
And most importantly…
- AP automation has the potential to reduce processing costs by up to 80%.
Likely this last bullet point got your attention. If it did, keep reading. There’s more good information here!
Manual Invoice Process Versus Invoice Process Automation
First, let’s take a look at the evolution of accounts payable automation. Each of the steps in the manual process outlined below represents a paid employee’s time. Note how a document passes through various people and departments. At each step, there is a potential for disputes and errors as the document moves through the approval process.
Enabling service providers to submit pricing changes to both new and existing price books directly in OpenInvoice, where changes can be viewed, disputed, and approved in an automated workflow. This ensures that all parties are using the latest agreed-upon pricing. By automating — or even eliminating — these steps, your team’s efficiency improves. This enables the same volume processing with lower headcount, if necessary, or the reallocation of staff to higher-value activities.
When you enter your invoice and field ticket volume into the calculator, we use these efficiency savings to calculate the potential cost benefits for your business. This is the first step; we understand your business is unique and that you may have other inputs or considerations. If you want to explore the detailed ROI, our team can provide that as a next step once you have completed the initial opportunity sizing.
Note: There is no commitment to entering your organization’s information. We will send you an email with the results that you can share with your team, and your information will be kept completely confidential.
The calculator shows savings related to the invoice, field ticket, and price compliance solutions. The biggest savings utilize these products together to automate the entire accounts payable function.
Click the graphic below to access the savings calculator.
Here’s how OpenInvoice, OpenTicket, and PriceBook work together.
Invoice Process Automation
Invoice automation is the first step in digitizing back-office processes. The solution integrates with your ERP and leverages the OpenInvoice workflow to automate the intake and approval process.
This enables:
- Faster processing teams
- More accurate spend visibility
- Better cost management
With the largest supplier network in the oil & gas industry, your suppliers are likely already using OpenInvoice to submit invoices to other operators. This high adoption within the supplier community means you can achieve high levels of automation almost immediately.
Field Ticket Automation
OpenTicket, Enverus’ cloud-based field ticket management solution, empowers operators and suppliers to generate, review, and approve digital field tickets in the field.
This provides value in a couple of key ways:
- Faster invoice approval and payment
- Virtualizing this process in the current market eliminates the need for field workers to bring physical tickets to the office when many remain closed
Price Compliance Automation
Spend management can be difficult in an industry that involves complex services, a multitude of back-office systems, and decentralized operations. On average, more than 3% of invoices contain incorrect pricing information.
PriceBook addresses this issue by:
- Enabling service providers to submit pricing changes to both new and existing price books directly in OpenInvoice, where changes can be viewed, disputed, and approved in an automated workflow. This ensures that all parties are using the latest agreed-upon pricing.
Early Pay Discounts
By automating and accelerating the invoice approval cycle, you increase your organization’s ability to negotiate and take advantage of early-pay discounts. The savings calculator uses industry averages for discountable spend and discount rates.
These are just some of the opportunities that automated invoice processing for accounts payable can offer. Once the data is digitized, you can access additional savings through solutions that leverage spend data analytics, such as OpenInsights and Audit Intelligence.
If you haven’t visited the calculator yet, try it now by clicking on the graphic below to see how much your company can save with accounts payable automation. We think you’ll be pleasantly surprised!
For information about Enverus business automation solutions, email us at [email protected].