Johannesburg, 19 Jul 2013
Electronic document delivery today is a must-have for any business. The issue of security in an increasingly online-centric world has long been addressed, making e-billing a secure and safe delivery method.
"Electronic delivery of billing or financial information when delivered correctly through a system that is reliable and compliant, such as ACTNET'S EDD (electronic document delivery) solution, is more secure than paper-based mail," says Nolan Sandham, Managing Director of ACTNET, the developer of EDD.
"Documents delivered in the mail can be opened or not arrive, which delays collection of monies due. With paper-based delivery, it is next to impossible to ensure an audit trail which proves the recipient received the invoice and statement. Ultimately, this affects your ability to collect money and impacts your business's cash flow."
Secure e-billing solutions like EDD create legal and tamperproof electronic documents in a 128bit encrypted PDF format, ensuring that delivery is secure and complies with legal and statutory regulations.
In addition, e-billing is environmentally friendly and cost-effective, as reduced paper usage decreases production and postage costs significantly.
"Yet the benefits of an e-billing system are not just around reliability and security. Finance departments are swamped with queries from customers who want their invoices resent to them, or who want to query something, and the accounts department either can't access customer records quickly or struggle to find what they are seeking.
At the heart of ACTNET'S EDD product is a sophisticated archiving system built on a robust high performance application for intelligent records management, document storage and bar coding on invoices/statements, making PDF documents searchable for easy indexing and referencing. It also allows for third-party information to be brought into the system as well as paper-based supporting documents such as purchase orders and delivery notes.
According to Sandham, this significantly reduces the time required by the accounts department when responding to customer queries, making them more productive and improving relations with their customers.
Companies can go one step further and give their customers Web access to the portal for self-service management of their invoices and statements. This is a huge benefit for swamped accounts departments, especially those with a large customer base, thus contributing towards improving CRM.
"Another massive benefit for companies is the reporting that comes with EDD, providing a complete audit trail showing activity logs on all queries, as well as detailed delivery reports, which can be used for performance management and reduction of disputes," he says.
A final benefit, explains Sandham, is through e-marketing and branding opportunities where companies can benefit from targeted promotion and advertising by adding relevant company messages into e-mailers and on PDF invoices/statements. Statements and invoices are expected and therefore result in higher click-through rates and ROI than traditional e-mail marketing. More than 95% of transaction documents are opened and read each month - far more than any other type of direct marketing campaign."
He adds that as a result, marketing included in these types of e-mails and documents has a higher click rate and conversion rate.
"Using our sophisticated data mining technology and system intelligence, we are able to customise promotional offers to targeted customers based on their transactional data. This increases the relevance of your marketing to customers significantly. Statement-based marketing is effective because it enables targeted promotions to be automatically generated by the transactional data within the document itself. It can be personalised according to customer demographics, business drivers and marketing criteria."
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