Kefron, the document and process automation specialist, is calling for recruitment companies to evaluate their invoice processing system as the industry sees a growth in contractors.
Recent research has found that the recruitment industry now generates over £35 billion each year with 9,500 reporting an annual turnover of over £250,000. Contractor placement is a growing line of business for many agencies with the number of freelancers at two million and rising. As a result, many recruitment companies often have tens of thousands of monthly contractor invoices to manually input, validate against timesheets, approve and process payment. This time consuming and manual approach means many accounts payable systems are unable to keep up with the huge volumes of invoices and associated documentation.
Kefron’s Automated Accounts Payable Solution is a cloud-based platform with ISO 27001 Information Security accreditation for the management and automation of contractor invoice processing that works alongside existing finance and accounting software.
James Smith, UK Sales Manager, Kefron said: “The move to contractor invoice automation is an easy win for recruitment agencies. The agency saves time and money by reducing manual data entry by up to 90% and timesheet data can also be extracted and automatically validated against the relevant invoice. Duplicate, lost or misfiled invoices are eliminated completely and human touchpoints and therefore errors are greatly reduced.”
It’s not just for internal reasons that companies need to be reviewing processes. In May this year the Treasury proposed new rules which mean agencies could become responsible for identifying the correct contractor ‘employment’ status and deducting the correct tax accordingly. A move expected to deliver up to £1.2bn annually in additional revenue to the tax coffers by 2023. Having an accurate invoice processing solution with a complete audit trail and secure record will aid compliance and reporting. Management will also have full visibility of all stages of processing allowing greater oversight and control.
Dealing with contractor queries also consumes vast amounts of staff time and this too is eliminated as contractors can log-in and check the progress of their invoice any time and avoid emailing or phoning agency staff.
James continues, “We know from our discussions with finance directors and controllers in recruitment agencies that paying contractors on-time and accurately each week or month is critical in retaining resource with valuable skills and knowledge. The market is simply too competitive and having a reliable portfolio of motivated contractors that deliver for clients on a consistent basis is a real strength. Kefron AP provides agencies with a best-practice solution to achieve just that.”
As a cloud based system Kefron AP integrates easily for automated data transfer to and from any finance or ERP system. Users can access on mobile devices from anywhere and having a single shared view of all invoices and data enables collaboration between users located in multiple branches or locations.