What are the challenges in paying telecom invoices?
Your company needs to use IT and telecom assets and services to operate. Because these costs have set monthly due dates, you have to keep track of them so that you don’t pay late fees or other penalties. We all pay our personal invoices without extra help from technology, so it’s not too complicated, right?
Think again.
The invoice process can be a very daunting task. This is especially true when you have hundreds or even thousands of plans spread across several telecom providers, and you’re using paper invoices. You need to account for the details of all of the contracts associated with these plans to make sure that (a) you’re paying for the plans in a timely manner and (b) you’re actually getting what you paid for (or that you’re not using what you haven’t paid for).
Does this sound like a headache already? You don’t know the half of it, especially if you’re using paper invoices rather than electronic invoices. Here are four important reasons why paper invoices make your life harder:
- DELAY: There’s always a lag before you can even begin processing the invoices.
Here’s the thing: If you’re using paper invoices, you have to wait until the invoices are mailed to you before you can kick off the process. That basically means that you’re not in control of a key part of the process; it can wreak havoc with your planned workflows.
- DETAILS: Paper invoices always include less details than electronic invoices.
Paper invoices only have the key details you need to track and that fit on the paper, whereas there’s no real limit to electronic invoices. Just for comparison, on paper invoices you can expect roughly 12 points of data while electronic invoices can have more than 60 fields. You can drill much more deeply to get better insights into your usage with this greater volume of data.
- TIME: Processing paper invoices takes much more time.
This is the real showstopper. A regular paper invoice can be as long as 300 pages. That takes a skilled technician a full working day to process. That’s nothing compared to the truly gargantuan invoices. There will be times when a single invoice can be as long as 7,000 pages. That’s right – seven thousand. For just one invoice. That’s nearly a month’s worth of full time work by that same overworked technician.
Now, can you guess how long it takes to process a single electronic invoice, regardless of length? It’s a matter of minutes. That’s right; in the time it takes for you to have just one coffee break, a single electronic invoice is done. And that’s true regardless of the length of the invoice. You have to ask yourself: How many full-time technician hours do you save using electronic invoices?
- ERRORS: There are more errors in processing paper invoices.
With a very skilled technician, you can process paper invoices with about 99% accuracy. Electronic invoices, meanwhile, are processed with 100% accuracy. That 1% may not seem like much, until you remember that a single invoice can be as long as 7000 pages. Now, can you imagine, after a full month’s work, you end up with 70 pages’ worth of invoicing errors? That amount of error will cost you a lot of money, one way or the other.
Invoice processing, the Cimpl way
Here at Etelesolv, our Cimpl solutions provide an easy way to manage all of your IT and telecom expenses, without having to spend days (or even a full month) performing the task. 96% of the invoices we process are electronic, and we have a dedicated team overseeing every aspect of this process. This helps avoid the problems of paper invoices in a big way.
The following infographic displays how Cimpl solutions process invoices, taking a load off of your back and making your life much easier.
To sum it up, processing electronic invoices gives you three big advantages over processing paper invoices: It’s faster, more accurate, and more data-rich. Stated another way – using Cimpl as your telecom expense management solution is faster, more accurate, and more data-rich. It will give you some significant ROI. In fact, to figure out how you can get 5-30% ROI from a TEM solution, check out our free ePaper today.
Watch our short videos on CimplManager and CimplControl to discover more.
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