How to Save up To 80 Percent of Effort when You Are Doing Your Bookkeeping

Bookkeeping is very time-consuming and costs both money and nerves. The administrative effort is especially noticeable in small and medium-sized businesses – not only in office management. A study by Sage shows that German companies spent 3.9 percent of their time with unproductive administrative chores in 2019, which constitutes losses of about 30 billion Euro – that is 6.4 percent more than in the previous year. The manual follow-up of unpaid invoices as well as general invoice processing tied up a large part of capacities. Nobody can afford such a loss of productivity in the long term.

To be specific, the manual processing of a paper-based invoice costs up to 20 Euro. This amount comprises costs for postage, paper, printer, toner, storage-, transport- and staff expenditure. The latter is often very high, since paper-based processing consists of many error-prone and time-intensive work stages. These include the manual copying of invoicing information into the bookkeeping software, corrections, and the search for documents. As well as, there is the long throughput time, which leads to companies not being able to take advantage of early payment discounts. These disadvantages also apply to invoices that are electronically received by email or through a customer portal, but are wrongly printed out for further processing.

Automating bookkeeping

These costs – and efforts – can fortunately be reduced by a multiple through automation. The e-invoicing journey 2019-2025 by Billentis, for example, shows that automated invoice processing, as opposed to the conventional paper-based way, can lead to cost savings of 60 to 80 percent in most cases. To ensure that you can benefit from the savings as quickly as possible, we’ve got four tips for you:

1. Automate invoice reception
   Let a software retrieve your invoices from online portals and email postboxes automatically, and additionally use a scan app to digitalize paper-based receipts! This way, you can digitalize invoices as well as scan other documents by touch. Lost documents are a thing of the past.
2. Use a document archive
   You can use a document management software (known as DMS system) to manage your documents. You don’t inevitably have to invest in one, though. A secure, contemporary archive equally ensures that all invoices are transparently made available in one location, can be managed with tags, and can easily be found by full text search.
3. Automatically forward invoices
   Link your document archive to the solutions that process your invoices and receipts! That might be an accounting solution or even the system used by your tax consultant.
4. Set up workflows
   If you want to digitalize your bookkeeping, you’ll also have to set up digital processes suitable to your company structure. This includes processes like invoice approval, invoice verification or the automation of payments.

The implementation is, by the way, quite simple. All steps can be realized without great effort with GetMyInvoices.

The bottom line

Conventional invoice management, which costs lots of time and nerves, has become obsolete in the digital age. Use the advantages offered by digitalization and automate a large part of your bookkeeping! Save up to 80 percent of the costs for invoice processing and invest those resources in value addition processes! That would be far more beneficial for you.

Try it now!