APQC’s research in the USA shows that typically the cost of processing an invoice ranges from - at best - $0.71 and  - at worst - $11.50, see figure below:

Improving the efficiency of you’re A/R processing could bring other benefits:

• stronger protections from fraud
• better cash-flow predictability
• happier customer service reps and customers.

A really inefficient A/R can lose you customers, e.g. customers could learn to their chagrin that the company’s system marked them as late in paying their bills because the A/R department had fallen behind in processing and posting payment transaction data.

Keeping up-to-date

It is also vital for the A/R department to keep up-to-date in each country with how e-invoicing is developing and VAT changes. The latest news from the excellent Bruno Koch at Billentis is that in:

• Belarus and Indonesia, from July 2016, will require VAT invoices to be issued in electronic format.
• Peru will require the next group of businesses to exchange invoices by electronic means only. This will affect approximately 12,000 companies from July. In December, e-invoicing will have to be adopted by a further group.
• Uruguay larger groups depending on company revenue are already required to exchange invoices exclusively in electronic format from this month and the next group will follow from December 2016.
• Sweden, the number of e-invoices sent to consumers via online banks in 2015 increased by 13 percent over the previous year (14% in 2014 and 16% in 2013). In the same year, 54% of private e-banking users (3.3 million) received e-invoices. As the number of e-invoices sent out last year via this channel reached 108 million, this resulted in an average of 32 e-invoices per service user. The number of businesses issuing e-invoices using this channel amounted to 1,521. (Source: Wallin Consulting)