A typical manufacturing company will have cut back on hiring new employees, stopped buying capital equipment, slashed research and development and frozen new product launches. Directly impacted by the recession is the accounts receivable (AR) process. The customers of the company that owe it money may pay slowly, late, or not at all, further reducing revenues. The affected company will pay its own bills more slowly, late, or in smaller increments – this in turn may reduce the company’s credit rating and its ability to obtain financing.
In short, it’s a vicious circle which many organisations have fallen victim to. So, any strategy to facilitate the payment of invoices and reduce the days sales outstanding (DSO) is critical to any business, large or small.
This whitepaper considers the true cost to deliver a business to business (B2B) invoice and proposes a flexible and innovative method (based around the Pareto principle or 80/20 law) to deliver invoices instantly, cost effectively and with complete visibilityThe Death of Post
In the last five years we’ve seen an explosion in the growth of electronic business document transmission – common formats and methods of transmission include:• EDI (Electronic Data Interchange)• XML, CSV or other structured file formats sent via email, FTP or secure web portals• PDF or Tiff images sent via email
Of the formats and transmission methods listed above, PDF sent via email is proving popular. This is because it provides a direct replacement for post but at a negligible cost. You also negate the need to agree a “true electronic” format to exchange data, as a PDF is simply an electronic image of the original paper document.
Comparing the Cost
If you’re comparing the cost of Post vs. PDF (sent via email), you realise the reason for its popularity:Cost to create the document – Post vs. PDFPost– circa 20p (this includes printing cost, paper, envelope, energy and labour)PDF – circa 1p (there are no material and labour costs only software and energy) Cost to send document – Post vs. PDF