Key takeaways:
Late payments, lack of visibility and match exception errors top the list of healthcare suppliers’ accounts receivable (AR) pain points.
Manual invoicing and payment processes used by far too many suppliers and their healthcare provider customers are largely the cause.
Digitized e-invoicing and e-payables processes can help solve this by cutting down on errors and optimizing efficiencies on both sides of the healthcare supply chain.
Procure-to-pay (P2P) – the process of requisition, ordering, receiving and paying for products and services – is essential to every business in commerce so it should be a simple business practice, right? It can be, especially for those organizations that have embraced the power and efficiency of automated, data- and technology-drivenopens in a new tab accounts payable (AP) and accounts receivable (AR) processes.
But for those that haven’t, like the overwhelming majority of organizations in the healthcare industry that continue to rely on manual invoicing and payment transactions (think email PDF and snail mail paper), the P2P process isn’t simple. In fact, it’s unnecessarily complex and riddled with errors.
Healthcare P2P processes largely run on paperopens in a new tab and PDFs, and they are alarmingly powered by human hands. Despite the best intentions, human intervention often complicates, and frequently compromises, the healthcare supply chain. Paper- and PDF-based transactions are:
Less efficient than an automated e-invoicing and e-payables solution.
Manually keyed, making them prone to human error starting at order origination through invoicing and payment.
Costly for the healthcare industry in terms of both time and money.
Unsecure and much more susceptible to fraud and theft.