Lübeck. Small and medium-sized companies in Germany are open to technologies that simplify invoice management, but are not yet exploiting their potential for automating work steps. This is a key finding of the 2021 invoice management study by software provider GetMyInvoices in cooperation with FastBill, developer of the accounting software of the same name.
A total of 76 percent of companies said they could access their accounting from anywhere. “This means that documents are digitized and are available in this form,” says Björn Kahle, COO of fino, the provider of GetMyInvoices. He adds: “Companies are trying to take advantage of digitization.” This is also supported by the fact that 59 percent of the companies surveyed use software that automatically collects and forwards documents, and the majority pay their invoices via online banking (66 percent) or software (17 percent). At the same time, however, the study found that those responsible still spend an unnecessary amount of time processing invoices.
A lot of work and a lot of mistakes
The largest proportion of study participants (39 percent) need eleven to 19 hours per month to process invoices. For ten percent, it is even 20 to 50 hours. 29 percent said that this step takes them two to ten hours. Only 20 percent manage the tasks in less than two hours. 41 percent find searching for invoices, 28 percent entering information from receipts and eleven percent forwarding the receipts particularly time-consuming. Many companies have to post receipts - for the largest proportion (47 percent) this is between eleven and 20 copies per month. Regarding invoices, 45 percent said that they manage the majority of documents by scanning analogue invoices; 15 percent print out digital invoices and file them. “That surprised us a lot,” reveals Björn Kahle, adding: “That means there is great potential for improvement. Because these activities not only eat up time, but are also highly error-prone.”
The survey confirms this susceptibility to errors. For example, 38 percent of study participants occasionally cannot find or read a receipt when it is needed. For 20 percent, this happens frequently, and for five percent, it happens very often. Of the missing documents that tax advisors request, receipts rank last at 25 percent. Most often, receipts from online portals are missing (47 percent), followed by analog documents (28 percent). Overall, submitting receipts is on the agenda for half of the participants.
This also leads to problems when paying invoices. While 39 percent of the companies surveyed pay their invoices within four days and 37 percent need five to ten days to do so, 21 percent regularly miss deadlines, for example for discounts or payment terms, because the processes take too long. “There is clearly a need for improvement here, which can easily be met by automating the work steps,” says Björn Kahle.
GetMyInvoices systematically supports companies
Two main reasons why this has not yet happened are that small and medium-sized companies often have no knowledge of the relevant solutions (32 percent) or do not have the time to deal with them (26 percent). “This is a very interesting finding for us,” concludes Moritz Wagner, Head of Sales at GetMyInvoices. “We will therefore do even more educational work in the future on how our software supports companies and systematically guide them through their steps towards automating invoice management.” In order to meet the increased need for information, the first step has already been to free online training In addition, cooperation with tax consultants is to be further expanded.
