Electronic Invoicing Community Brings Trading Partners Together

The paper invoicing process has long been a major hassle, particularly for businesses that deal with a large number of vendors. In addition to driving high operational costs, paper creates slow, inefficient, manually intensive workflows. Many businesses are living the same scenario, where a large buyer receives thousands to tens of thousands of paper invoices each month from thousands of vendors. The data entry alone is overwhelming, draining the company of valuable resources.

To alleviate the problem, businesses are continually looking for ways to eliminate paper processes. Until recently, however, electronic invoicing projects have had mixed results at best. The primary reason is that the value proposition is typically strong for the buyer but weak for the vendor. The business world is littered with electronic invoicing projects where only a small portion of vendors participate.

While traditional forms of electronic processing – such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), eInvoicing Networks and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) – have had only limited success, the tide is turning as a new, clever approach is gaining momentum. Just as social networking for personal pursuits brings together a diversity of individuals, Transcepta’s new electronic invoicing community is poised to do the same for business partners whose common purpose is to buy and sell goods and services.

“The Transcepta Electronic Invoicing Community introduces a unique ‘many-to-many’ relationship that benefits both buyers and vendors across the board,” said Transcepta’s director of product management, Shan Haq. “In many industries, numerous buyers are likely to share the same vendors. As the community grows and matures, the benefits of this ‘many-to-many’ relationship are fairly obvious. For example, when a new vendor joins the community, over time it becomes more likely that some of their buyers will already be members – and vice versa.”

Using Transcepta’s Community process, vendors simply print their invoices out of their existing system to a Transcepta virtual printer that is downloaded off of the Internet. Transcepta takes over from here by transmitting the invoices to their data center, which converts them into whatever form the buyer chooses. The buyer receives the invoice and can directly import it into their accounts payable process. For vendors looking for additional value, invoices can be sent to other smaller buyers by email, postal mail, or fax. This flexibility enables vendors to outsource the entire invoice send process.

“Electronic invoicing is something to consider whether you’re a buyer interested in improving efficiency, reducing costs, and taking early pay discounts or a vendor interested in improving trading relationships with your customers,” added Haq. “The Transcepta Electronic Invoicing Community is the ideal solution because it is free of start-up barriers and benefits the vendor, which dramatically increases adoption rates.”