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This is often a process issue more than anything else. For instance, our finance team spends insane amounts of time dealing with a variety of invoices with var
by cosmodisk 7y ago
This is often a process issue more than anything else. For instance, our finance team spends insane amounts of time dealing with a variety of invoices with varying information and structure.There are a number of exceptions, rules and etc. However what's often ignored,is the fact that we are much bigger than any of our supplier and it would be pretty easy to convince them to invoice us the way we want instead the way they want. With some clever automations, I could easily replace a couple of my colleagues with software, however I would not be in a better situation at all,so no point of doing it.
- robocat 7y agoWhile that would eliminate jobs within your organisation, it would clearly create development work in your suppliers. On balance I would guess you would create work overall rather than reduce it.
- majewsky 7y agoTangentially related: The German industry is working on a standard for digital invoices. Invoices would be a human-readable PDF file with an additional XML payload containing a machine-readable version of the same data. I can't say anything about adoption though. The Google keyword is "ZUGFeRD" for those who are interested.
- maximente 7y agocolombia is also implementing the same thing, their customs/tax authority has a custom XML schema (!!) where large business are rolling out .pdf and .xml receipts. https://globaleinvoicing.com/en/electronic-invoice/colombia https://globaleinvoicing.com/en/electronic-invoice/colombia - for an english link
- ryanmarsh 7y agoPlenty of companies still use EDI for this.
- ryanmarsh 7y agoThis is a great example. I automated away the jobs of a few people at a transportation company that had a few large clients that expected to be invoiced in particular ways with additional documentation. We put together a document imaging solution to gather all the relevant docs from all loads and made the pickiest customer the default for all invoices and automated the entire system. Instead of laying those people off though, we focused them on calling on unpaid invoices which greatly helped accounts receivable. Similarly, at an oil and gas company we took the better of several business processes, molded them into one optimized process, automated it, and after a dip in the price of oil and layoffs many jobs were never rehired for. At both of these places the leadership saw the value of getting the software right, hired for it, and we got the job done. I estimate the oil & gas company saved themselves $1 Billion over the next 10 years.
- cosmodisk 7y agoThe only thing I don't like about these situations is how little money the developers get for doing things like this. Any other profession would be rolling in money after bringing such savings,yet the developers end up getting pennies ( relatively).