The research conducted by Sapio Research and Wax Digital in September 2017 shows that 82% of 200 UK finance professionals surveyed said that poor invoice process management was impacting their teams’ ability to perform effectively and leading to low job satisfaction.
60% say that processing supplier invoices is the most hated aspect of the job amongst their team, 70% find it laborious and tedious, and it causes frustration for 69%.
Over half of the finance people surveyed regularly have to deal with suppliers issuing invoices with incorrect financial values and 37% said that the wrong or missing PO numbers and non-matching line items are also common problems. For 34% missing VAT numbers were another frequent bugbear and 31% said that invoices often arrive addressed to the wrong legal entity within the business.
Finance teams are particularly concerned about the knock-on effects of manual supplier invoice management:
Many worry about departmental output, with 45% citing impact on organisational efficiency
37% go on to say that these issues could hurt supplier relationships
Just over one third also fear their team will make additional manual process errors
A similar number show concern that their frustrated colleagues will leave their jobs
97% of those surveyed believe that automated invoice processing or e-invoicing would improve their team’s job fulfilment and 99% see opportunities to reallocate personnel who are manually processing invoices to more useful tasks. 46% would move people to work on process improvements and 45% would get people to find new solutions to managing errors.
The study was conducted by Sapio Research on behalf of e-procurement provider Wax Digital, and targeted 200 senior managers with a responsibility for finance in medium to large UK enterprises. 44% of respondents were from organisations with 50-249 staff, 37% had 500-999 staff and 19% had over 1000 staff.
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