Tariff Affiliates

Automating Utility Processing with Electronic Invoice Delivery

  

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Do you consider an invoice in pdf format sent via e-mail, an electronic invoice?

I don’t.

All too often I hear, “We already receive most of our invoices electronically” only to later find out what they meant, or what they interpreted as electronic delivery, was that they could download their invoice from the internet or that it’s being sent by e-mail.

It’s very nice of those companies to allow their customers access to their invoices or even e-mail them, but the main goal of having your invoices electronically delivered is to shift the responsibility of data entry from accounts payable to the vendor or a third party procure-to-pay (P2P) provider.  When you can start receiving your invoices in a format that can feed right into your accounting system, ready to be routed, approved and paid, you’ll eliminate a laborious and error prone step, while reducing your processing cost substantially.

Think about the last utility invoice you received. Someone at the utility company up on the tenth floor took data from the field and created an invoice on a computer, then prints it out on paper and mails out (using more paper and postage); it’s then received 5-7 days later at your company and then converted BACK into your required electronic format. Did I mention, at some point someone will convert this data BACK to paper and mail out a check, this time to someone on the top floor.  

So, do you consider an invoice in pdf format sent via e-mail, an electronic invoice?