End AP Pressure: Close The Door On Manual Mail Sorting & Invoice Processing By Samuel L. Schrage, AnyDoc Software

Lost and misrouted documents can hurt vendor relationships and performing inefficient manual processes costs dearly. Automated classification and data capture solutions can save a company millions – but which are the main aspects to look for when evaluating a software solution? Download a free white paper "Imaging and Workflow: A Buyer's Guide to Accounts Payable Automation Solutions" written by independent accounting analysts, PayStream Advisors.

No matter what you do, at the end of every month your staff always seem to be putting in extra hours rushing to get those final invoices processed and into your accounting or ERP system. Not only do they need to make sure everything is in balance – but there always seems to be a pile of invoices that have gotten misrouted and show up in their inbox needing to be keyed in the system and processed at the last minute. And then there are the invoices that leave your company's mailroom, never to show up again – and only are discovered to be missing when an angry vendor phone call is received!

Studies show that the cost to manually process an invoice in 2005 was on average $35.00 – a figure that has more than tripled since 2000. If a company is processing anywhere from 2,000 to 10,000 invoices a month, it can cost anywhere from $75,000 to $350,000 a month. That's $840,000 to $4.2 million a year!

The majority of the escalating costs of manual processing are derived from two tedious and labor-intensive processes. Incoming invoices must be manually sorted and physically routed to the correct location such as to a specific accounts payable employee or to a group of employees who may be assigned to process only certain vendors. As stacks of paper invoices travel through your inter-office routing system, delays may occur due to misrouting or backlogs – if an employee is out of the office, the whole routing process may stop with invoices piling up in an unattended inbox.

Sam Schrage is President of AnyDoc Software, a leading provider of automated data capture and document processing software solutions. With more than 19 years in the software industry, Schrage combines his technical acumen and business administration background to keep AnyDoc Software on the cutting edge of the data capture industry.