$3 trillion. That's how much money is overdue from invoices right now in the US. Vendors feel the pain every day this cashflow problem lingers.

While the average payments terms are 30 days, businesses take 33 days to pay their invoices. That means the average payment duration is 63 days in the US! 50% of invoices are paid past due. And that was before COVID. The data is still coming in, and the full effects are still permeating into industries at various rates.

​Over 90% of companies reported late payments by their B2B customers. 

Especially when AP teams are working from home and all sectors are being slammed from COVID, these staggering problems are an urgent call for innovation in invoicing. 

References: Atradius

It is no secret that the ongoing COVID-19 global pandemic has severely strained supply chains around the world. From the meat packing industry to medical equipment/PPE suppliers, several industries have endured the virus’s effects. With about 95% of the surgical masks and 70% of the respirators used in the US manufactured overseas, this pandemic has exposed our dependence on other countries as well as glaring inefficiencies within our domestic supply chains (US Department of Health and Human Services). According to a 2020 global survey, 73% of buyers and users of freight transportation and logistics services reported the coronavirus having an impact on their supply chain operations (Statista).
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How far do these inefficiencies extend? How can businesses across the country collectively correct their course? These are pivotal questions with answers that have been overshadowed by other issues. In short, automation helps companies cut costs and maximize their potential, particularly the digitization of documentation involved throughout the supply chain.

To understand the depth of this issue, inventory errors, missing paperwork, inadequate visibility, incorrect pricing, incorrect invoice payments, inventory delivery delays through manual receiving processes, and more cost an average of $120 to $150 per purchase order in shipments to distribution centers and retail stores (SPS Commerce). Moreover, businesses waste 6,500 hours per year, on average, on inefficient payment practices (chasing purchase order numbers, processing paper invoices, and responding to supplier inquiries) equating to over $170,000 in losses annually (SourceToday). Despite these losses, the average supply chain only has a digitization level of about 43 percent (McKinsey)!

Businesses have more to gain from digital accounting practices than they are aware of with only 2 percent of surveyed executives mentioning supply chain as the focus of their digital strategies (McKinsey). Meanwhile, they have the most to gain from updating this segment of their business; on average, companies that aggressively digitize their supply chains can expect to boost annual growth of earnings before interest and taxes by 3.2% — the largest increase from digitizing any business area—and annual revenue growth by 2.3 percent (McKinsey).

The increased earnings are a result of the savings and productivity enhancements made by automation technology. Cloud computing reduces labor costs by 50% (Forbes), while automation delivers an average of 29% reduction in invoice processing costs (SAP Concur) and allows businesses to produce a range of 15 to 30% increase in transaction volume (cvision). 

Considering the overwhelming benefits of automation within the supply chain, it has never been a better time to introduce this technology into more businesses nationwide. Amid the current economic crisis, companies can still manage to reduce labor costs without losing productivity by automating document processing and related inefficiencies. This is simply the first step to more stable and dependable domestic supply chains that will support the future of our country.



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Amidst widespread unrest and a pandemic, businesses go into survival mode. When business owners cut costs and ship orders as fast as they still can, they often think about how they can reduce their cost of goods sold, streamline labor, and connect with customers more closely. Meanwhile, the expensive and time consuming processes that shadow the dealings between businesses are overlooked as a hindrance.

These dealings are the countless invoices and shipping labels that are processed every day by businesses across the country, and globe. An average of 40% of firms of all sizes indicated that most of their vendors submitted paper invoices, while this applies to about 62% of small-mid sized enterprises (ARTSYL). More than 50% of these companies report these manual and paper-based processes to be a pain point in their business (AIIM).

Many businesses have not yet adopted this technology primarily due to lack of awareness, fear of change, and perceived upfront costs. With that being said, why are so many CFOs and business owners impressed when they DO discover Accounts Payable (AP) automation?

In this case, the numbers speak for themselves. In a nutshell, automation can cut costs by 81% and improve efficiency by 73% (Business Insider). To address cost and efficiency, AP automation can save $16+ per invoice, depending on the size of your company (Vanguard Systems) and professionals who automate invoice capture and payments save an average of 1 hour every day (MineralTree). And the long term costs of all this? AP automation software has been found to pay for itself within 6–18 months on average (Vanguard Systems).

​The savings may seem too good to be true, but the hidden costs and time spent sending, processing, and organizing paper invoices have blinded executives to alternatives. Ditching paper invoices and manual entry eliminates the need for a redundant bookkeeper and consolidates accurate records in a single, secure location for easy retrieval. With numerous social and economic forces acting against companies, there has not been a better time to integrate automation into your business. 

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The Intelligent Document Processing market is rapidly accelerating at 70-80% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) as enterprises seek to harness the power of AI to improve compliance, governance, and cost-efficiency of processing documents into data. The market size is over $1 billion in 2020, according to the Everest Group. 

Some key findings are: 

• Banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) and healthcare industries are the early adopters of IDP.
  
  
• Consumer package goods (CPG) and retail, travel and logistics, manufacturing, and telecom are also deploying IDP solutions to process documents such as proof of delivery, custom declarations, driver logs and maintenance logs.
  
  
• North America and Continental Europe dominate the market for IDP solutions, largely driven by mature enterprises within BFSI.
  
  
• OCR, computer vision, machine and deep learning models, and NLP are the key core technologies powering IDP capabilities.
  
  
• Sophisticated features such as configuration and set-up GUIs (general user interfaces), review or correction GUIs, workbenches for IT users, and analytics dashboards are proving of great use to enterprises.
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• The IDP software market primarily comprises three types of solutions: platform-based, package-based and IDP-as-a-service solutions. Package-based solutions are expected to become more prevalent than platform-based and IDP-as-a-service solutions, as they can be easily deployed and take less time to achieve high accuracy for pre-built use cases.

​For more information, refer to Everest Group Report: Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) Annual Report 2019 – Let AI Do the Reading

We experienced first-hand the immense loss, inefficiencies, and outdated processes in the supply chain, working with industry leaders in supply chain and eCommerce.

Over half of invoices, packing slips, and orders are still sent over paper, email, or PDF. People on the receiving end still do significant manual data entry, increasing labor costs, mistakes, errors, mis-ships, over payments, and loss. Over half of Fortune 500 companies report that late shipments and delayed fulfillment inhibit their customer success, as they try to keep up with the "Amazon effect" in eCommerce fulfillment. These issues are due to inaccurate inventory data, which in large part stem from inaccurate inbound receiving, inventory inspections, and invoicing.

We then sought out to solve this problem once and for all. Equipped with state-of-the-art computer vision and natural language processing, we amassed one of the largest datasets of industrial invoices, packing slips, receipts, and other trade documents, and built partners with industry leaders around the globe.

Allied with experienced execs who automated Amazon, Boxed, and other eCommerce unicorns, we're positioned to make distribution, fulfillment center, logistics provider, import, transportation, and tech businesses  as efficient as Amazon. 

Our vision is to enable any business to share, collaborate, and communicate around data seamlessly, starting with supplier data, eventually building a bridge to customer data.