How ePayables Solutions Are Helping Businesses Improve Productivity and Reduce Costs

For years, accountants and operations managers in the oil and gas industry have been waging a behind-the-scenes battle against a growing mountain of paperwork, with some A/P paperwork requiring as many as 60 steps and a half-dozen individuals to process. Then came ePayables, and suddenly companies had the ability to digitize those paper invoices or do away with the paper completely, making for a more efficient, more accurate way to process data while improving profit margins.

Traditional paper-based invoice processing vs. ePayables

Traditional, paper-based invoice processing, as everyone knows, is expensive and inefficient. It's expensive because it relies on paper and people. Indeed, for an average company, the cost to process a single invoice can run as high as $100. Multiply that by the number of invoices an average company receives in a month (which could be in the thousands or tens of thousands), and that can have a serious negative impact on a company's bottom line.

Not only that, but manual, paper-based invoice processing is inefficient in that it can result in payment errors, duplicate payments, and mismatched invoice data, due to the number of steps and people it takes to typically process an invoice. And those errors can further drive up costs and cause delays throughout the organization. 

Yet until relatively recently, there was no alternative to traditional, time-consuming paper-based invoice processing. But thanks to the introduction of ePayables solutions like Spendworks^TM from Oildex, now there is. Unlike paper-based invoice processing, ePayables solutions are highly accurate and cost effective, because of their ability to automate accounting operations and workflow, streamlining and speeding up the routing, coding, approval, and validation of invoices. Moreover, because most ePayables systems integrate with a company's accounting or enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, businesses reap additional back-office efficiencies and time savings by deploying them.

The Oildex Spendworks ePayables Solution

Designed specifically for oil and gas companies, the Spendworks ePayables solution from Oildex has been helping accountants and operations managers track and control costs and boost productivity for over ten years. It has also received several industry awards and accolades for innovation and being a viable green technology. 

Companies that switched to Spendworks have reported a significant decrease in the number of steps required to process an invoice. One company recently reported their process steps decreased from 25 to just 5, and their cost to process a single invoice, dropped from $40 to just $4.50. That's a more than 85 percent savings!

Because Spendworks customers process their invoices more quickly, they can take more early pay discounts. In fact, some clients save enough money in early pay discounts, to pay for their Spendworks system usage.

Spendworks further helps companies increase efficiency by providing useful features like an online repository for invoices, purchase orders, and field ticket information, so that users across the enterprise, regardless of their location, can access and process data with the click of a mouse. Best of all, Spendworks frees up busy engineers, accountants, and procurement professionals to focus on tasks that help grow the business, instead of wasting time mailing, faxing, and tracking down documents.

For companies that want to reduce the costs associated with invoice processing and improve productivity, ePayables is the solution

For the last five years, an increasing number of companies around the world have been adopting ePayables solutions to help them streamline their invoice processing and workflow. And according to a recent study, 55 percent of businesses noted that automating invoice processing and workflow was a top priority.

So what are you waiting for? Automation is a crucial strategy for enterprises that want or need to significantly reduce costs, and ePayables solutions like Spendworks from Oildex, with its proven ROI, can help companies get out from under that mountain of paper and be more productive.

About Oildex, a service of Transzap, Inc.
Oildex operates one of the energy industry's largest SaaS-based (Software as a Service) data exchanges, serving over 5,000 companies and 44,000 registered users. The Oildex suite of services streamlines operations, enabling companies to shift from paper-based processes to electronic and provides tools for companies to track and understand their transactions in near-real time. Currently available services include: digital and scanned invoice processing (Spendworks^TM), business intelligence (TrendX^TM), owner/producer relations data posting (Owner Relations Connect^TM), check stub reporting (Checkstub Connect^TM - CDEX), scanned check stub reporting (CDEX Complete^TM), joint interest bill processing (JIB Connect^TM), scanned JIB processing (JIB Complete^TM), budget creation and approval (AFEWorks^TM), crude oil data exchange (Run Ticket Connect^TM - CODE), production, and sales volume reporting. Oildex has offices in Denver and Houston.