Electronic Invoicing
Introduction
Electronic-invoicing (also known as e-invoicing, EIPP or electronic invoice presentment and payment) has captured the interest of prospective buyers at companies and institutions around the world because of its well documented reputation of achieving the lowest cost Accounts Payable (AP) transaction processing. There are many definitions and capabilities of e-invoicing, including the creation and receipt of an electronic invoice; the transformation of a paper invoice into an electronic invoice; the automated entry and validation of its data by a financial accounting (ERP) system; workflows to resolve purchase order discrepancies, manage non-purchase order invoices, payment approval and electronic payments.
Invoice receipt, capture, ERP system entry and validation have the most visible cost implications. Before considering the technologies to automate these areas, prospective buyers need to address the challenge of automating the end-to-end process to realize the complete set of benefits:
• Cost and error reduction
• Strengthening and automation of internal controls
• Maximum visibility into the process
• Optimizing AP’s management of cash
• Improved service delivery
• Efficient, self-service interaction for suppliers and internal
customers
To realize these benefits, buyers must develop an e-invoicing strategy that incorporates the needs and desired benefits, and addresses the inhibitors to adoption by the supplier base.
Enterprise Capture: Enabling Customer Service Improvement, Cost Cutting, and Compliance for Financial Institutions
Less than a decade ago, the biggest concern of large financial institutions was whether their systems would be prepared for a changing date. The banks were more than ready for the year 2000. Little did anyone suspect the turbulence that lay ahead—most of it paper based.
The housing boom of the 1990’s brought a flood of new loans, mortgages and a wide range of new and creative banking products. Financial institutions broadened their services, offering brokerage accounts, NOW accounts, Roth IRAs, savings plans and lines of credit. The response was an ever increasing number of depositors. Correspondingly, paper volume increased.
Today the financial services market is experiencing unprecedented transformation. Restructuring, consolidation and volatility are driving significant structural changes in the investment and retail banking sectors. Banks are responding by actively looking for ways to improve liquidity, restore investor confidence, increase customer retention and better compete for deposits. They recognize the need to streamline business processes to better support their clients during account opening, loan origination, mortgage processing and portfolio management.
Banks must also comply with increasing government requirements for accountability and transparency. Regulatory compliance has become a critical and costly issue for financial institutions. In addition to regulations protecting depositor assets (such as CRD in Europe) and shareholder interests (such as SEC requirements in the US), financial institutions also must now concern themselves with a myriad of oversight and regulatory requirements that are document driven in nature. New regulations, growing and changing customer demand, refinancing, a new competitive landscape, and lack of investment capital require banks to radically improve their risk management, operational efficiency and customer service. That means they need to cope with an ever rising volume of paper and documents, but even more, with its effective and transparent processing.
Visioneer OneTouch® with Kofax® VRS® Technology
“There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.” It’s not often that Victor Hugo gets quoted in the world of document imaging. So you should already be expecting something spectacular. Two technologies that have shaped and influenced the art and practice of making document scanners easy to use and dramatically enhanced image quality have come together.
In 1998, Visioneer changed the way that users interacted with their scanners. Previously there were multiple steps to scan a document or photo. Launching software, setting resolution, paper size, prescan, color depth, cropping, saving, etc. And the average user who was not skilled in scanner or imaging technology had no idea how or why to make these choices. So any scanning task took up to 14 steps and some techno-savvy. Enter Visioneer OneTouch. Visioneer created buttons on scanners that let the user scan with one touch to already configured settings for different applications: scan a photo, scan to email, scan to the printer (copying), etc. Before you knew it, everyone starting putting buttons on scanners. Why? Because ease of use was ease of use was more important than any other feature including price. The steak is more important than the sizzle.
At the other end of the user spectrum was Kofax. In the high speed production market where scanners eat paper for a living, there was trouble in scanned document image quality. Document quality differed, sometimes dramatically. There were of course clean laser quality documents, but also faded copies, unclear faxes, colored multipart forms, highlighted text, etc. And at one scanner setting, some pages scanned fine and others were illegible. At speed greater than 100 pages per minute, there was no time to go back and adjust settings for imperfect originals and then return the fixed scan to the digital stack. So Kofax developed Virtual ReScan or VRS.
The Top 10 Reasons to Automate Your AP Processes
Overview
Finance organizations are charged with reducing costs, improving performance, achieving regulatory compliance, increasing visibility and enabling the corporation’s strategic initiatives — all at the same time. The fundamental issue is not whether a company should strive for these goals but how well they can be accomplished. A strategically engineered transformation of processes that achieves these goals —
cutting operational costs and minimizing financial risks — obviously requires serious consideration. This white paper examines in detail the relevant issues and benefits of Accounts Payable (AP) transformation as well as recent industry-wide research and best practices around such initiatives.
Evidence suggests that the core solution to the Finance challenge lies in optimizing workflow processes to improve overall speed, efficiency, control and visibility of operations. Optimization is a function of finely choreographed automation and best practice workflows expertly applied to a set of processes. Automation effectively meets the AP challenges of cash management, lack of transparency, process inefficiencies, delayed closing times, poor productivity and threats to compliance posed by fraud and errors.
IKON Office Solutions Selects Kofax Front Office Server as a Product of Choice for its MFP Devices
IRVINE, CA, JUNE 29, 2010 – Kofax plc (LSE: KFX), the leading provider of document driven business process automation solutions, today announced an expanded relationship with strategic alliance partner IKON Office Solutions, Inc., a Ricoh company, in which IKON will offer Kofax Front Office Server to empower its multi-function peripheral (MFP) devices with robust, industry-leading office automation capabilities.
The recently released 3.0 version of Kofax Front Office Server allows users to capture forms and documents at their points of origin through MFPs, desktop scanners and other devices for accelerated processing through Kofax Capture and Kofax Transformation Modules software, and to access scan-to-email and scan-to-fax capabilities. Kofax Front Office Server is a distributed solution that supports Ricoh’s full line of MFP offerings. This latest agreement with IKON will bring Kofax Front Office Server to a broader market of potential users.
“Having IKON offer Kofax Front Office Server to its customers is a huge step in our goal of becoming the leading provider of these office automation solutions worldwide,” said Alan Kerr, Executive Vice President of Field Operations at Kofax. “We’ve enjoyed a successful relationship with IKON as a strategic alliance partner in the past, and this latest agreement will only strengthen our alliance and grow our successes.”
“As Kofax’s Partner of the Year in 2009, we are pleased to expand our relationship through this latest alliance agreement,” said Mike Dane, Vice President of Marketing, Ricoh U.S., for Ricoh Americas Corporation. “Adding Kofax Front Office Server strengthens our robust portfolio of solutions for our users, and reinforces our leadership position in offering copiers, printers and MFP technologies to our growing customer base.”
National Security Technologies Selects Kofax to Accelerate Invoice Processing for the Department of Energy
IRVINE, CA, JUNE 22, 2010 – Kofax plc (LSE: KFX), the leading provider of document driven business process automation solutions, today announced it will provide an invoice capture and processing solution to National Securities Technologies (NSTec), a joint venture of several defense contractors serving multiple agencies of the U.S. Federal Government. The value of the contract to Kofax exceeds $400,000.
NSTec will utilize Kofax software as part of its operations at the U.S. Department of Energy National Nuclear Security Administration’s Nevada Test Site. The firm will implement Kofax Capture and MarkView for Accounts Payable to scan and extract data from approximately 60,000 invoices received annually, export the data to its Oracle E-Business Suite, and route each invoice for coding, approval and exception processing. As a result, NSTec will be able to accelerate the processing and payment of its invoices, reduce manual processes, and better manage its financial operations.
“Our MarkView Financial Suite has helped a wide range of customers reduce costs by leveraging a single, consistent, end-to-end process for managing all incoming paper and electronic invoices,” said Alan Kerr, Kofax’s Executive Vice President of Field Operations. “Combined with our document capture product portfolio, MarkView delivers a financial process automation solution that is easy to deploy and use, and proven to deliver a rapid return on investment.”
Ascent Capture
A Single Solution for Information Capture
Kofax is focused on the first and most vital step in information management: consistently capturing the various types of data that exist throughout your organization, in the highest quality possible, and indexing it all so you can easily find it again. Whether your information is on paper or in electronic files, whether it is parked at a central office or scattered on desktops and remote offices throughout the world, Kofax can help you capture it all quickly and accurately.
Ascent Capture accelerates business processes by collecting paper documents, forms and e-documents, transforming them into accurate, retrievable information, and delivering it all into your business applications and databases. It offers unmatched compatibility with scanners and other capture devices, plus content and document management systems, workflow applications and databases. No matter what hardware or enterprise applications you choose now or in the future, you can count on Ascent Capture to ensure consistent capture, indexing and validation of your important information.
Kofax Announces Release 2.0 of Kofax Express
IRVINE, Calif., January 20, 2010 – Kofax plc (LSE: KFX), the leading provider of document driven business process automation solutions, today announced a new release of Kofax Express, an all in one scan to archive software package for image capture applications. Release 2.0 offers new features that enhance the application’s ease of use and expand its functionality, thereby increasing productivity and significantly reducing operating costs.
“Kofax Express 2.0 reflects our ongoing commitment to invest heavily in document driven business process automation applications across all market segments, from basic image capture to advanced enterprise level solutions,” said Jim Nicol, Executive Vice President of Products at Kofax. “Demand for Kofax Express continues to accelerate, especially among small and mid sized organizations. This release strengthens the software, enabling customers to scan and archive documents more quickly and at lower costs.”
“Our business depends on our ability to efficiently and effectively automate our clients’ paper heavy processes, and Kofax Express helps us do that,” said Jennifer Van Hart at Micrographics, Inc., a leading information management service bureau based in Florida. “The software provides a single, turnkey capture solution that is fast, effective, reliable and easy to use and deploy.”
Automatic Image File Importing
Release 2.0 optimizes the FolderScan function, which allows the automatic import of image files (TIFF, PDF, JPG, and BMP) from a folder directly into Kofax Express, better enabling capture from sources such as MFPs, fax servers and saved images. This provides users with a time and cost saving single interface to their back end repository for images from all sources.
Kofax Provides Leading Brazilian Financial & Banking Association ABBC with a Distributed Capture Solution for SICREDI Bank
IRVINE, Calif., January 19, 2010 – Kofax plc (LSE: KFX), the leading provider of document driven business process automation solutions, today announced it will provide Associacao Brasileira de Bancos (ABBC), a leading Brazilian financial and banking association, with a distributed capture solution for SICREDI Bank, Brazil’s largest credit union. The value of the contract to Kofax is approximately $500,000.
ABBC will implement Kofax software to capture and extract data from more than 20 million checks and related multi page financial documents received annually at over 300 SICREDI branch locations and export the resulting data and images into ABBC, SICREDI, and Brazil Central Bank repositories. The system provides a check truncation solution that significantly reduces the time and costly manual labor needed for paper based processing. As a result, SICREDI will reduce operating costs, accelerate business processes and improve data quality, leading to better cash management and customer service as well as improved compliance with banking and regulatory requirements.
Kofax Provides Progressive Insurance with an Accounts Payable Workflow Solution
IRVINE, Calif., January 15, 2010 – Kofax plc (LSE: KFX), the leading provider of document driven business process automation solutions, today announced that Progressive Casualty Insurance Corporation, one of the largest automobile insurers in the United States, will implement MarkView for Accounts Payable software to automate the processing of approximately 150,000 non-claims based invoices it receives annually at its shared services center. The value of the contract to Kofax is approximately $500,000.
MarkView for Accounts Payable automates financial processes to ensure the consistent, efficient, cost effective and timely processing of invoices from receipt through payment. Invoices are captured in Progressive’s ERP system the day they arrive from suppliers, thereby accelerating approval and payment cycles and improving cash management as each invoice is closely managed from receipt through payment and automated business rules are applied to make appropriate tradeoffs between payment timing, potential discounts and late payment penalties. A single repository for all invoices and the associated back up and processing history increases the company’s financial controls.
