In small companies purchase invoices are mainly paid by the company owner, who controls the expenses and only pays what needs to be paid. In larger companies invoices are normally paid by the accountant, who is usually not aware of all expenses and tends to pay anything that is brought to their desk. In this way companies become exposed to the security risk: inside a pile of purchase invoices that an employee brings for payment, there might be a couple of fuel or other sort of receipts that were not used for the company purposes. Invoices or reimbursement receipts with a small total amount are seldom checked, hence one can get away with such fraud.

Another issue is the classic long process of invoice approval: e.g. your accountant receives a $1000 invoice that has to be approved by the management. The next step is to contact the management by phone or email and wait for the confirmation. This process has proven to be time consuming.

WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT IT?

As the issue arises, company management starts looking for a way to avoid unnecessary money loss and waste of time. There are two options to deal with the problem:

-Option A – start using document management software. There are plenty solutions on the market, for smaller and larger businesses. Although, most of these solutions are rather expensive, and they have a quite high learning curve – you have to spend significant amount of time on the learning process, implementation and introduction to the employees. Also, these solutions are not very useful for small and medium-sized companies. All is needed for small and medium-sized companies is the approval function itself.

-Option B – start using the invoice approval feature, integrated directly into the accounting software. Generally, such solutions are priced cheaper, they have exactly the necessary amount of settings and they are easier to use.

Option B is what ERPLY Books is doing today. Purchase Invoice approval is a relatively cheap, yet powerful solution that resolves the problem of manual approval of purchase documents by automatically sending an email with the document itself and the Approve and Reject buttons. The process is quite fast and simple – the receiver opens the confirmation email, reviews the document and approves/rejects the payment. It is also secure, as the documents are only sent to those who have to see them. In this way, sensitive information (if it is present in the document) is not shown to the parties that shouldn’t see it. At the same time, the invoice approval process is transparent and it avoids errors, as the rules of who and how approves the documents, are set in the software and can be checked by the authorized parties at all times.

You may find more information about Invoice Approval HERE.

ERPLY Books team