Leave the Snail Mail to the Snails with Accounts Payable Automation

Last December Canada Post announced a 5-point action plan designed to reverse course on the downward financial spiral that it has been on for years.  You won’t be surprised to learn that the amount of domestic paper mail handled by Canada Post declined by 20% or 1 billion pieces, between 2006 and 2012.

None of the initiatives got a particularly warm reception from business owners or the general public. You can debate which one was least popular. The 30% increase in postage rates and the imminent end of home delivery were hot topics.  I’m guessing it was the thought of trudging to the local community mailbox in the middle of Canadian winter that upset most people. The increase in the cost stamps didn’t generate a lot of love either, however many consumers now communicate with friends and family on line.  Frankly, I don’t expect to receive a lot of Christmas cards in the mail this year.

Despite that decline, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business surveyed small business owners last fall and found that 98% still use letter mail monthly.  No doubt, some of those pieces of mail are invoices. Since it is costing your vendors more to mail you invoices, and costing you more to mail checks, now is a good time to take a look at an accounts payable automation solution that actually simplifies your entire AP process.

Automating your procure-to-pay process gets rid of the paper, the stamps and the headaches.  I’ve talked with many AP managers who have a full-time FTE doing nothing but scanning invoices.  For all of you AP folks who are tired of spending hours a day manually entering tedious invoice information into your accounting software, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. With Beanworks, your vendors can email their invoices directly to our auto-capture service, which digitizes the invoice headline information.  Invoices appear in your Beanworks workspace with the vendor, received and due dates, subtotal, taxes and total already coded for you. They can then be sent to the appropriate people for further coding, approval and payment, all online. The days of going home with sore hands and blurred vision are over!

You are probably asking yourself, how reliable is the auto-capture service? Even the best OCR software in the world isn’t 100% accurate 100% of the time. Beanworks auto-capture service provides quick, reliable data with 99% accuracy, 99.99% of the time.

Your vendors will thank-you for the opportunity to deliver invoices using email, but your AP staff will be ecstatic that they don’t have to open and sort mail or spend hours scanning paper invoices and haranguing approvers. With a solution like this, why spend money on mail, couriers, scanning and late fees? Beanworks’ customers can reduce their AP costs by at least 50%.

Automating your accounts payable system may not make Canada Post happy, but it will have a positive impact on your bottom line.

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