We still come across a lot of organisations out there, including some very large ones, that have invested often considerable sums of money in automating the invoice matching process around indirect goods, but have nothing preceding it at the purchase end of the process. This has always struck me as rather a horse/stable gate interface, for a number of reasons:

»        If you aren’t capturing indirect spend at the point of order, you have no visibility as an organisation of your exposure to your suppliers at any given time

»        Workflowing electronic invoices to only a few line managers tends to mean they get large numbers of invoices queued for approval, which they subsequently do not have time top properly check

»        Even where invoices are subsequently examined and reviewed, approvals are made retrospectively after purchase. This is fine for capturing errors, but not for applying spend controls

I can see why some organisations have been attracted to it in the past – implementing a standalone invoice matching system can appear much more straightforward in process terms than going down the purchase-to-pay road, with fewer stakeholders and simpler workflow processes – but in the final analysis it is streamlining a bad process. Without the proper checks and balances applied through a complete purchase-to-pay solution, in which invoice matching has an important part to play, the matching process on its own fails to deliver genuine business benefit.

As a manager at one business I saw very recently (with a market leading invoice matching system in place) commented: “I get far too many invoices to approve to look at any of them, I just approve them. I often think that if anyone was after an easy buck they could just send us an invoice and I’ll bet it would get paid”.