Electronic Invoice Presentment and Payment

What is Electronic Invoice Presentment and Payment (EIPP)?

Electronic invoice presentation and payment enables businesses to transition from manual invoice processing and payment services to digital services. It streamlines and automates the invoicing and payment process to reduce operational costs, delivers better customer service, and facilitates faster payments to businesses.

How EIPP Works in 3 Basic Steps

EIPP includes several basic elements:

Presenting the invoice. After generating the invoice, the business sends the invoice to its customers through email, an online portal, or a text message. This is typically done by integrating the EIPP with the business’ Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. The invoice includes important details such as the payment due date, invoice amount, and payment options.

Processing the invoice. The customer processes the invoice, matching the invoice details with the purchase order and receipts. If the system finds a discrepancy, it is flagged for review.

Payment and approval. Businesses offer customers the option of paying the invoice through various channels, including bank transfer, digital payment, and credit or debit card.

The Benefits of Electronic Invoice Presentment and Payment

Due to its many advantages, many businesses have already made the transition to digital invoices. This improves and optimizes business operations in the financial and accounts receivable department, which has many advantages.

These include:

Increased efficiency. Electronic invoice processing facilitates better communication and greater accuracy, leading to fewer delays and disputes to begin with, so businesses get paid faster.

Better use of resources. Automating manual processes makes it easier to scale when your company expands its customer base. Eliminating the need to deal with repetitive, time-consuming tasks allows your A/R teams to use their skill set for higher-value tasks.

Accelerate cash flow. EIPP automates and streamlines the entire invoicing and payment process and facilitates better communication with customers, reducing the number of disputes and discrepancies so you get paid faster.

Reduce cost. Automatic invoicing eliminates the need for postage, paper and administrative resources. Outsourcing invoicing and payments also increases operational costs.

Improved customer experience. Manual invoice processing means that the majority of communication between the business and customer is on the phone or in emails. This disjointed communication can be difficult to track and explain to managers or new employees who might need to be brought up to speed.
Better tracking. Moving to electronic invoicing and payment allows for data to be centralized in one place where it can then be analyzed for insights. These insights can then be presented to internal stakeholders to demonstrate improved performance or show where it can be further optimized.

Overcoming Challenges in EIPP Implementation

Even when it’s perfectly logical to move to electronic invoice presentment and payment solutions, change is hard. If you’re looking to transition your business to digital invoicing, you’ll need to do this slowly to acclimate your team.

Here are a few tips to get started:

Focus first on automating the most repetitive tasks. Once employees see that there’s a solution for eliminating time-consuming and repetitive tasks, they’ll be open to additional changes.
Demonstrate how it helps achieve business goals. You’ll need to communicate closely with internal stakeholders to understand any specific challenges facing the business in their invoicing and payments and explain how EIPP software can help solve it.
Offer employee training. Ensure the EIPP solution you choose offers an employee training program to help the team adjust to the new system. This can take time and consume in-house resources, so it’s important to consider this when estimating the time it will take to switch to a new system.
Ensure it integrates with your ERP system. Many ERPs offer limited automation, so companies are often enticed by the option to integrate their ERP with EIPP software. Not all EIPP software integrates with all ERPs, however, and some integrations can be time-consuming or resource-intensive.
Investigate compliance requirements. Businesses must often meet requirements such as data protection and privacy laws and various industry, accounting and financial standards. Any EIPP software businesses use must meet those same standards as well.

How Gaviti Facilitates Electronic Invoice Presentment and Payment

Many businesses have transitioned from manual to digital payments with the help of EIPP software or various EIPP solutions. In addition to electronic invoice processing and payment, Gaviti’s automated and streamlined A/R management platform optimizes the invoice-to-cash process.

This includes:

Invoice distribution. Automate the distribution of invoices to your customers.

A/R management. Get a single view of A/R data centralized in one place and gain greater visibility of information such as outstanding balances, customer payment history, and collection status.

Dispute and dedication management. Track, code, route and resolve invoice disputes and deductions by identifying recurring issues, their causes and what steps you might take to prevent them in the future. Eliminate delays and speed resolution by automating routing each dispute to the relevant individual or team.

Credit monitoring and management. Automate the setting of credit limits for each customer according to their creditworthiness and risk and get alerts when that customer is close to their predefined threshold.

Payment gateway. Offer multiple methods of payments for customers that include ACH, credit and debit card, digital wallets, and more, improving customer satisfaction and encouraging timely payments.

Want to learn more about how Gaviti can help automate your entire A/R invoice-to-cash process? Contact us and book a demo today.