Financial Compliance & e-Invoicing

Transacting business in the global marketplace requires compliance with increasingly complex regulations—which can be as varied and numerous as the countries in which you operate. Unfortunately, the number of regulatory requirements is growing dramatically every year; with each new law comes another chance of noncompliance fines and sanctions, any of which could easily put you out of business or ruin your reputation.

In addition, the costs of international commerce can put downward pressure on your profitability. The burden is greater for companies that use traditional means of transacting business. Without e-Invoicing, you face several challenges:

• High days sales outstanding
• High cost of sending paper invoices and reconciliation of disputes
• High number of days to reconcile a disputed invoice with both customers and suppliers
• Processes are manual and not integrated with business partners
• Large amount of aging and uncollected receivables
• Difficulty in predicting cash flow
• Difficulty showing audit trail for closing books and complying with European and Latin American tax authorities

But even for those companies that use electronic invoicing, there’s the overwhelming problem of standardizing formats—especially problematic when you do business with thousands of suppliers or customers.

There is, however, one fast, affordable, complete solution to all of these challenges: e-Invoicing by Crossgate.

ACCOUNTS RECEIVABLE
Crossgate’s Business-Ready Network allows you and your international trading partners to use any electronic format you choose to exchange electronic invoices. There are no forced standards, so you and your trading partners can send information in the format easiest for you, including flat files, PDF, Web portals, Ansi X12, EDIFACT, or XML. There’s no reformatting of information, so business can be transacted smoothly and efficiently.

Crossgate’s e-Invoicing enablement facilitates compliance by providing:

• A tool to meet invoicing regulations in over 38 European Union and Latin American countries
• Protection against audits and VAT tax inquiries
• Digital signatures and archiving requirements
• 10-year storage and search capability

The result is dramatically improved cash management:

• Reduced days sales outstanding
• Reduced cash conversion cycles
• Faster dispute resolution
  
  

ACCOUNTS PAYABLE
Your accounts payable process usually involves large volumes of data. And since it directly affects your bottom line, digitizing that data has never been more important. Why? Because in the age of electronic invoicing, automating your A/P process makes it transparent and auditable, helping you reduce errors, enforce guidelines, accelerate the approval workflow, and accelerate your flexibility to take A/P discounts.

Think about the costs of processing paper and the personnel involved in manually entering data:

• Traditional paper invoices can cost over $30 to process
• Additional personnel and man-hours—approximately 60% of all inbound Account Payable related calls involve invoice disputes

Now consider the cost savings:

• Electronic invoices are less costly to process by eliminating the manual data entry and accuracy issues
• You can reduce full-time employees dedicated to invoice processing and reconciliation
  

Over the last decade, there have been a number of solutions from OCR/scanning to portals introduced to reduce the cost and delays of processing supplier invoices; however, none of them have solved the key problem: how to make it easy for the supplier to participate. Crossgate’s “Come as you are” business model allows suppliers, for the first time in history, to send electronic invoices without having to jump through hundreds of portals or map hundreds of customer data standards.