Think back to the last time you received an invoice from a supplier. You likely submitted it to your Accounts Payable (A/P) department for processing and payment and then thought: My job is done here. I submitted the invoice. That is until your supplier contacted you weeks later, wondering when they’re going to be paid.

Now what? You don’t know when the supplier will be paid – after all, you’re not in A/P. So, you likely spend your valuable time working with A/P to determine when the invoice will be paid, because you want to keep your supplier happy. Then, you work with your supplier and keep them posted about their expected reimbursement date. Seems like a lot of work, doesn’t it?

What if there was a way for the supplier to go online and with just a couple of clicks and get complete visibility into where their invoice is within your company’s reimbursement process? Better still, what if they could do all that without you even being involved? No more getting stuck in the middle, trying to keep the peace between A/P and your supplier. Well, the good news is that Concur now offers a better way to bridge the gap between the supplier and A/P department.

Concur’s new Supplier Portal provides suppliers with free 24/7 visibility into their payment status. Now suppliers have secure online access to their submitted invoices and can easily see where their invoice sits in the reimbursements process. Better yet, the supplier doesn’t have to pay any fees or do any IT work. All they need is an Internet connection and they can easily access the Supplier Portal through Concur Invoice. Since suppliers can now view their invoices at their leisure, your suppliers just got a whole lot happier and you just saved yourself a whole lot of time. A 2009 study from Aberdeen Group found that A/P staff can spend up to 24 percent of their time answering queries, the vast majority of which are from suppliers checking on the status of their invoices and payments.

Not to mention the productivity boost this provides your A/P department. Instead of chasing down payment status details and answering your urgent questions about where your suppliers invoice sits in the reimbursement process, A/P can now focus on value-added tasks.

Now doesn’t this sound like a process that can improve efficiency, save time and reduce costs for you and your organization? Plus, you’ll improve supplier relations.

What process does your organization use today to manage invoices and communicate between A/P and suppliers? How would a solution like Concur Invoice’s Supplier Portal help improve that process?