It’s been an impressive year at PayStream Advisors. Among our 2014 developments and achievements, we published 22 research reports—many of which explore new territory that includes Human Resource Management, VAT compliance in Latin America, Budgeting and Forecasting solutions, and more. We welcomed 125 business professionals to this year’s summit, INNOVATE 2014. We saw our Senior Analysts attend over 25 industry conferences from London to San Diego. We launched the exciting P2P Academy, which is now offered online via a self-study course.
In all, we’ve been working hard to broaden and enhance our educational offerings for our readers. The amazing AP, Procurement, and P2P automation trends that have been evident in businesses and industries throughout the world have inspired much of these improvements.
Among these trends, there has been a great increase in global eInvoicing and eProcurement 
initiatives. While Latin America has been the leader in national eInvoicing adoption for several years now, much of the rest of the world is starting to catch up in back-office automation. For example, Kenya adopted a national eProcurement system in an effort to bring the use of public money under greater transparency and accountability. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia, among other Middle Eastern countries, are moving towards more uniform eInvoicing initiatives. The EU has been identifying issues with their current tax and trade systems, and is moving to make eInvoicing more appealing and accessible in order to correct these problems.
This past year has also seen more global movement to provide small to medium-sized enterprises with access to eInvoicing and working capital optimization programs. President Obama passed the second version of the Supplier Pay Initiative to promote expedited payments from large corporations to their smaller vendors. The UK launched several initiatives to spur small business growth, including revamped VAT tax returns and more releases of educational market material on small business financing. GT Nexus, IFC, and Levi Strauss & Co (LS&Co) have partnered to create a new supply chain finance program that provides financial incentives for garment suppliers in developing countries.
Other vendors have taken note of SME initiatives and the widening middle market—in response they have also been creating unique financing programs and solutions. To complement SupplierPay, Taulia Inc. launched the Early Payment Quick Start Initiative, a program that encourages and simplifies early payment financing. TradeShift has also taken a stand to help the small and big business connection with their expansive supplier onboarding techniques. PayPal’s new Working Capital will offer cash-advances for smaller companies who cannot as easily utilize bank loans and lending services.
There were many other instances when software providers, organizations, and governments took great steps towards better understanding automation possibilities this year, and towards making room for more widespread and optimized adoption (readers are encouraged to browse 2014 posts from our blog, PayStream Voices, for more). We are looking forward to 2015, and we are confident that it will bring us even greater and more inspirational P2P innovation.
ver-changing waters of eInvoicing technology and adoption standards, the
In many cases, the overload of similar invoices cause approval fatigue, which leads AP staff to approve invoices without even looking at the invoice images. For example, monthly recurring (cyclical) bills (telecom, utilities, small value cleaning bills, plant maintenance) come with such regularity (and sometimes at such high volume), they can all blend together for approvers. Another example is seen in the receipt of small invoices against an existing PO.
y email letting them know that the invoice has been sent on to payment.
tner, Ariba put together a very useful presentation on the notorious enemy of efficient AP: paper. Managing paper invoices is one of the most unrewarding parts of the AP process, as it requires valuable labor and time for non-value tasks like data entry and validation. Discrepancies, duplicate invoices, late payments, and missed discounts are all common results of a manual invoicing process. But while organizations can lose millions in potential revenue each year from processing errors, dependence on paper is a hard habit to kick. Of course, any of our regular readers know that the answer to these problems is a clean break from paper with business process automation, but this is often easier said than done. With the wide variety of P2P solutions and implementation methods available, it can be a little difficult to form a clear course of action to less paper and more efficiency.
AP and will remain in AP. A PDF file can never be better than the content from which is was created, so even if paper data has been converted to an electronic file, AP professionals will still have to deal with the inefficiencies of its original content structure. Instead of trying to fight uselessly against the source of the problems, look for ways to smooth over and transform these issues once they arrive in your system.
e the power of networked eInvoicing. If you’ve done the groundwork of evaluating the problems and accepting the power of a invoicing solution, this should be no problem. eInvoicing is the beginning of enhanced processes throughout a company’s P2P activity.
market: higher education. In the current turbulent economy, the arguments for and against the necessity of a secondary degree are irrelevant against the reality that many people don’t have a choice. The modern family struggles against financial instabilities that place the expense of colleges on the back-burner, and in turn, higher educational institutions are seeing dropping attendance and diminishing revenues.
