Invoice automation: Simplify your payments and strengthen procurement control

After a supplier sends an invoice, it’s your team's responsibility to ensure its accuracy. You do so by matching the invoice to corresponding internal documents and verifying the invoice amount before passing it to accounts payable (AP), which will then give it the green light for payment processing. 

This workflow seems straightforward enough. However, a single invoice can include dozens of small details your team must monitor for. With all these moving parts at play, there’s an increased risk of errors that can lead to overspending or bottlenecks, and traditional manual processes exacerbate these risks.​ In fact, 60% of respondents to the Institute of Financial Operations and Leadership’s survey report lowering risk as a leading reason behind AP automation.

In manual invoicing, your team is hands-on at every tedious, routine step of the validation process. But invoice management doesn’t have to be such a headache. Automation instead leverages thorough data capture to move invoices through their lifecycle without human intervention at every step. You set the conditions for each of these automations, so processing invoices remains entirely within your control and compliant with your purchasing policies.

Keep reading to discover how your team can use advanced procurement technology to streamline automated invoice processing and regain control, visibility, and supplier confidence.

What is invoice automation?

Invoice automation uses digital systems like machine learning, optical character recognition, and AI to capture, match, and approve supplier invoices. In a fully integrated procurement tech stack, automation bolsters the entire procure-to-pay (P2P) process by seamlessly connecting invoices to corresponding purchase requisitions, purchase orders (POs), and general ledgers so all the necessary information for a smooth accounts payable process lives in one place.

How automated invoicing reduces human error

Manual data entry and invoice approval routing are time-consuming at best. Additionally, having to manage each step of the invoice-processing workflow by hand increases the risk of errors slipping through and causing problems downstream. That’s because it’s easy for a stakeholder to press the wrong key and enter incorrect data accidentally. 

With a fully manual process, you likely won’t catch data discrepancies until invoice reconciliation. At that point, you’ll have to backtrack, review the data to find the mistake, fix it, and then continue the workflow, which ultimately delays the entire AP process.

However, automation makes this backpedaling a problem of the past. That’s because end-to-end automation software instantly pulls data from supporting documents and invoices. Based on this information, it then automatically routes invoices to the right POs, requisitions, and other paperwork. This automated workflow also has fewer steps that are prone to human error.

The link between automation and compliance

Your organization has purchasing policies that guide how it processes invoices. While it’s important to work within these policies, doing so is far more difficult when teams have to monitor compliance manually. 

That’s where automation can simplify purchasing compliance and create a consistent, policy-aligned workflow.​ Because you set the conditions for the automated event within your invoice automation solution, you can make sure they abide by your organization’s policies. 

A solution like Amazon Business can also help you monitor for policy violations by providing real-time visibility into organizational compliance rather than occasional, one-off audits. This helps you stay a step ahead in risk management since you can spot potential problem areas or violations before they delay your operations.

4 invoice automation benefits

By shortening the approval process, reducing risk, and improving accuracy, automation can become a crucial component of your organization’s financial stability. However, its benefits stretch beyond your bottom line to positively impact operational visibility, control, and supplier satisfaction. 

Here are a few more benefits that your organization could experience in your operations:

1. Faster approvals and payments

Automation handles invoice approval workflows in an instant. If an approver needs to review an invoice before it can proceed, for instance, the solution automatically alerts the stakeholder to verify the document. Additionally, instead of tracking down documents to confirm the pricing of each invoice line item, an automated process flags only those that have discrepancies. 

By speeding up this process, you can make sure that invoices move through to finance teams on or ahead of schedule.

2. Improved vendor relationships

Data on your internal processes is proof of your reliability, which you can use to show prospective vendors that you ensure prompt, accurate payments. You can also leverage performance data to negotiate more favorable contract terms. 

When you maintain accurate invoice processes in this way, vendors can trust that they’ll receive correct, on-time payments. This kind of confidence leads to smoother partnerships. 

3. Streamlined audits and reporting

Along with invoice matching and approvals, automation tools can aid with purchase compliance and spend visibility by extracting data from invoices and supporting documents. They then aggregate it to create a reliable audit trail. 

By using automation in this way, you’ll gain real-time insight into spending and purchasing compliance, rather than relying on sporadic audits that capture only snapshots of your evolving procurement and supply chain operations. Greater visibility into these areas empowers your team to manage operations more effectively to save invoice processing time, relieve audit fatigue, and improve cash flow.

4. Greater spend visibility and policy compliance

When automation fuels stronger spend visibility, your team can diligently track dollar movement to understand where your procurement spend is already efficient and where it could use improvement. 

For example, spend insight helps you uncover areas of maverick or tail spend. By identifying these noncompliant spending areas in your operations, you can then create opportunities to consolidate orders and strategize reorder timing. 

With this full picture of who’s buying what and from whom, reorder timelines, and spend, you can optimize your spending and ensure greater compliance across your operations.

How to implement invoice automation

Implementation and change management should be part of your decision-making process when choosing any new procurement technology. After all, your team is less likely to adopt a confusing, frustrating new process when they know the existing one well.

The following four steps outline a simple, scalable workflow for rolling out new invoice procurement automation software and processes you can use to increase the odds of successful adoption:

Step 1: Map your procure-to-pay workflow

Automation implementation begins with using cross-functional alignment and operational visibility to ensure everyone starts the process on the same page. 

The simplest way to achieve this alignment is to map your current P2P workflow and ask key stakeholders to weigh in on each step. This means inquiring about their pain points and how they envision that automation could address them. 

Creating this bird’s-eye view of your existing workflow simplifies identifying which parts to automate and how doing so will improve your invoice processing in the long run.

Step 2: Integrate with ERP or accounting systems

In order for your new automation system to accurately handle data extraction, match documents, house real-time spend data, and offer visibility into procurement compliance, it must integrate with your existing e-procurement tools. These tools include your enterprise resource planning (ERP) and accounting systems, as well as any other solutions that play key roles in keeping the procurement process moving smoothly. 

By connecting all these systems, your new automation solution can successfully capture, organize, and use data from across your organization to ensure fast, accurate invoice processing.

Step 3: Train teams on digital payment and approval systems

If you’ve already started the implementation process by aligning your procurement, operations, and finance departments, you need to maintain it to the end. A simple strategy for doing so is joint training. 

By helping your teams learn the new solution and workflow together, you’ll foster teamwork and camaraderie as they discover how their day-to-day will improve once the new solution is up and running.

Step 4: Start small, then scale

Once you have an implementation strategy, start with a small pilot rollout, iterate, and then expand for smooth, successful implementation. This approach allows you to test invoice automation in a measured, controlled fashion and make changes based on your learnings. These learnings help with fine-tuning the strategy before putting it into action across the organization. 

Handling implementation in this way also helps lower your stakeholders’ and buyers’ perceptions of complexity and risk.

How Amazon Business supports invoicing automation

While Amazon Business does cover invoice automation, it can go even further to bolster your end-to-end operations as your end-to-end procurement partner. That’s because its automation features greater procurement controls, visibility, and responsible purchasing functionality to help your team transform procurement into a revenue-driving force for your organization. 

The following breakdown of features shows how you can leverage Amazon Business to operationalize seamless invoice automation:

Pay by Invoice and consolidated billing

Pay by Invoice, an invoice solution for approved Amazon Business customers, grants your teams more payment options, control over procurement spend, and invoice payment timelines. This feature sends you an itemized digital invoice with 30-day payment terms (with longer extensions for eligible Business Prime members). 

It also allows you to make monthly payments, rather than per invoice. That means you could send a single lump sum to your go-to vendors each month, which allows you to maintain greater control and insight into your spending.

Three-way invoice match

Amazon Business’ 3-Way Match streamlines reconciliation by instantly linking your order to the supplier's invoice. That way, in a single location, you can bring together your order, item receipt, and invoice to quickly verify invoice amounts, oversee approvals, and forward them for payment. And if there’s a discrepancy, the solution lets you know that the invoice needs a closer look. In this way, Amazon Business helps you maintain purchasing compliance across your operations.

To set up 3-Way Match, Amazon Business seamlessly integrates with over 300 e-procurement and ERP systems, which support data centralization and spend visibility. These integrations empower your team with complete visibility and control over invoice processing.

Spend Visibility

Spend Visibility (a Business Prime feature) leverages automation by creating a comprehensive view of your spending habits using data from invoices and supporting documents. With it, you can see current spend, potential compliance issues, and opportunities for smarter budgeting in the future. 

Additionally, because all this data lives in one place, you can filter by PO number, invoice, supplier, account group, or spend category and track purchases by department, cost center, or buyer. This in-depth insight helps you make more informed decisions when updating budgets, finding ways to save, and measuring KPIs.

Guided Buying

The most effective way to ensure buyers purchase from preferred suppliers is to simplify the order process. 

With Guided Buying, you can set guidelines that encourage buyers to order from specific vendors or products that have a green “preferred” checkmark. For buyers, this feature simplifies finding the products they need without worrying about whether they’re purchasing the preferred item. And for administrative stakeholders, Guided Buying means you can facilitate compliant purchases without reviewing every order. This means you can spend less time answering buyers’ questions about what they can and can’t buy.

Make payments smarter, not harder

Without automation, invoice processing is a time-consuming, complex process that can lead to costly errors. However, teams that implement an invoice automation solution instead transform their workflow from a risk-prone, operational headache into a driver of financial and organizational growth.

As one such solution, Amazon Business helps your team collect valuable spend data, regain control over purchasing compliance, and uncover key cost-saving opportunities. All this is possible because the solution supports a unified purchasing process with features that provide you with critical operational visibility and thus empower your team to reduce its reliance on paper-based invoicing.

Are you ready to see how automation can streamline your payments and improve your visibility? Contact Amazon Business today to learn how you can achieve your current automation goals and see long-term scalability.