ne of the easiest ways to waste time, and therefore money, is to repeat an activity. Some office tasks such as stapling or stamping require repetition, but business process automation should cover those that don’t.

Take invoicing for instance. A common scenario sees your supplier manually creating an invoice, carrying out a mail merge from their accounts system before posting a printed copy to your accounts payable department. Your accounts department then manually enters the details from the printed invoice into your accounts system. They recheck each line on the invoice to ensure that the entered details are correct and flag the transaction up for payment.

During this process, the purchase details have to be manually entered twice. This is duplicated effort which costs both supplier and buyer time, increasing supply chain costs. The supplier has to factor those costs into their prices, as does the buyer.

By implementing an electronic invoicing and purchase order portal management system from Celtrino however, the data re-entry is negated. The invoice is sent directly from the supplier’s accounts system to the buyer’s via the Celtrino platform. The supplier also receives automatic acknowledgement of the invoice’s delivery. Immediately time has been saved for both parties, reducing costs across the board.

An added benefit of the Celtrino offering is that there is less room for human error to cause problems. What happens if the invoice received by the buyer has got wet in the post and the ink has smudged, rendering the line item costs difficult to read? If the accounts clerk enters the wrong details, a payment dispute will ensue, requiring even more time and money to resolve. The electronically submitted invoice however is quickly and accurately interpreted by the Celtrino electronic invoice processing component and entered correctly ready for payment.

The process also works on the purchasing level, allowing a buyer to submit electronic purchase orders directly into their supplier’s accounts receivable system via the Celtrino platform. No more duplicated work for accounts departments and no more data entry issues, means reduced costs all round.

About John Behan

John Behan joined Celtrino in 1992, and is currently Director.
John has many years experience in the Information Technology Industry. Areas of expertise include the management of major e-commerce projects in retail grocery, transport, insurance, electronics and public administration sectors, together with the project management and implementation of EDI, EDI messaging standards, XML communications, e-commerce, and architectural design of electronic trading solutions.