E-Invoicing Slow To Take Hold

The survey of North American companies suggests that 28% of their customers refuse to accept invoices in any form but postal mail. On the flip side, 89% of the responding companies said they maintained or increased the use of e-mail to send customer invoices over the last year.

On average two to three employees spend 106 hours per month generating and sending physical mail with invoice-related correspondence. Of the time spent on each invoice, only about 15% is spent on actual calculation of the invoice. The remainder of the time is dedicated to printing, addressing stuffing and mailing it. Of the 92% reporting invoice calculation was automated, 81% used SAP. Postage application is manual in one third of the organizations and 82% hand stuff invoices into envelopes.

Other areas respondents identified as challenging were the US Postal Service restrictions, machine maintenance, quality control, and reporting and tracking delivery status.