Shortening Purchase-to-Pay Cycle...
"E-invoice management precedes e-procurement." That's the strong message from Scott Cardais, president of AvidXchange, which provides invoicing and purchasing software for owners and managers of commercial real estate. When the dot-com boom struck five years ago, the hot idea was aggregating buying power to achieve MRO (maintenance, repairs and operations) cost savings. But Cardais argues that the practical benefits of electronic invoicing actually produce more immediate results.

Cardais walked me through an example of a typical AvidXchange customer with a couple dozen scattered properties. Just eliminating the cost of sending multiple FedEx packages of invoices to headquarters each week might save $40,000 a year (24 properties x 4 deliveries a week x 52 weeks x $8 a package). And that doesn't count the personnel costs of routing all that paper to various levels of approval layers.

Here's how AvidXchange handles electronic utility invoicing. First, all the customer's bills are sent to directly to AvidXchange for scanning. Second, AvidXchange validates each bill and notes any aberrations. Third, AvidXchange extracts the appropriate data and passes it on to a customized "approval engine." Fourth, after approvals, the invoices are loaded electronically into the customer's accounting system.

As mentioned in the last Dispatch, The Property Tax Man Cometh (Electronically), real estate infrastructure technology is quietly making inroads. The Internet has not fundamentally changed the roles of real estate players (owners, managers, brokers, tenants). But it does offer a way to make existing players much more efficient and profitable.

--Peter Pike