Reduce sales outstanding time, increase cash-flow and maximise your working capital

As ever increasing numbers of organisations are looking to lower administration costs whilst continuing to meet their CSR targets, many overlook the financial and environmental rewards of electronic document management.

We live in an age where everything needs to be greener, faster and of course, cost efficient. So developing systems and strategies for delivering and managing financial documents; such as invoices, remittance advice and other receivables, is essential.

Effective invoicing software and systems can automate and streamline an organisations entire accounts process.  Enabling businesses to automatically capture purchase orders and issuing invoices to controlling debtors and collecting payments electronically online is a must for any business looking to be green and streamlined.

Prime Documents “ecco” e-billing system integrates with existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) or invoicing software systems to provide a paperless and economic electronic invoicing process – e-Billing.

In addition to reducing  workforce, material and delivery costs associated with paper based invoicing, businesses also benefit by reducing errors, accelerating settlement times and enhanced brand visibility. But it’s not just businesses that gain here, e-Billing really does represent a win-win scenario for both businesses and customers.

Prime Documents “ecco” e-billing system works alongside a full electronic document storage and retrieval system which  provides an end-to-end online invoicing solution. Consumers benefit greatly from this combined service, enjoying instant delivery or access to their accounts, electronic  or online storage, download features (which can plug into a wide range of finance systems) and a much more efficient dispute resolution process.

Key Features ecco e-billing:

• Send electronic invoices and present online
• Real-time on-line management of all documents & transactions for customers
• Customers can download and interact with data in multiple formats
• Full document archiving with search and store features
• Automated debtor control and notification
• Range of reporting features including document status (delivered, opened, paid)
• Scalable multilingual, multi-currency opportunities
• Easy to use web screens with corporate branding throughout

Integrated Payments
Along with reducing administration costs and lowering environmental impact e-Billing represents the greatest value in the speed of payment and reconciliation. By enabling your customers to pay an invoice in real-time over the internet significantly speeds up the settlement time-line and drastically improves cash flow.

Our e-Billing platform, which currently handles Credit and Debit cards and a variety of other methods, means your organisation can provide your customers with a broad spectrum of payment options and your invoices are reconciled much sooner.

Fast Customer Enrolment with 100% Coverage
Customers can access their online banking modules from hand held devices in the blink of an eye-lid. Naturally they will expect the  same services from their other suppliers. The customer enrolment process through “ecco” e-billing is straight-forward, timely and simple. All a new customer needs to enrol on the e-billing platform is an email address.

• Branded registration screens integrated onto your website
• A swift and simple online enrolment process for customers
• Enables instant access to invoices

Service integration and roll-out process
At Prime Document we understand that service adoption and an effective, streamlined roll-out process is critical. Our team of dedicated account managers help every step of the way and are on hand to assist you throughout service integration and launch.

Summary of Benefits

• Save up to 50% per invoice on processing
• Instant and traceable invoice delivery
• Quicker dispute management
• Significantly reduce input errors
• Optimise outstanding debtor management
• Upto10 years online archiving
• Faster and effortless access for customers
• Marketing opportunities through electronic documents
• A greener, more sustainable process

According to a recent European Commission Survey the UK is well below average in harnessing the benefits of e – business.

Overall on e-business indicators, the UK came in at 28th out of 31 countries according to the scoreboard report published by the EC. The report shows the performance of countries delivering on the agreed targets of the Digital Agenda for Europe.

The Digital Agenda, launched last year, commits the European Commission and its member states to carry out specific actions to boost investment in, and use of, digital technologies.

In e-business, the EC ranks countries against indicators such as the number of businesses that share electronic information on the supply chain and how many enterprises use e-invoices.

The UK performed the worst against the electronic supply chain management indicator (6.7 percent of firms) and on exchanging business documents suitable for automatic processing (14.5 percent of firms), coming in 30th place on both, above only the Netherlands and Cyprus, respectively.

The top performers in these categories were Italy for automatic exchange of business documents and Croatia for electronic supply chain management.

The UK also ranked in the bottom five countries for the number of large (60.7 percent, 28th place) and small (26.1 percent, 29th place) enterprises that use software to share information on sales and purchases electronically and automatically, and for the number of enterprises that send or receive e-invoices in a format suitable for automatic processing (13.6 percent, 27th place).

Against these indicators, the UK only ranked higher than countries such as Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia and Hungary.

These figures are quite surprising, and certainly don’t reflect the trends we at Prime Document are seeing, indeed we are experiencing considerable growth in our ecco service.

Ecco is Prime Document’s full Electronic Document Management Service, of which, full details can be found at www.primedoc.co.uk/ecco

Ecco is designed as a full electronic document storage, retrieval and distribution system which works in the following way. Data is submitted to Prime Document over secure FTP links.

This data is processed and print streams are generated for the production of hard copy documents in the normal way. This data however is also processed through bespoke routines that generate multi indexed PDF files which are then ingested into a secure remote server. Once resident on this server they are available for viewing on a secure user name/password basis over 128k encrypted links.

Users will simply log onto the system over the internet and access the documents by keying in index fields. These can be specific document numbers like invoice numbers or a whole range of Boolean search facilities. If more than one document type is within this system, results will contain all document types for the given search criteria. Additionally and on a selective basis documents can be ebilled to the recipients and their response monitored and reported on by the system