Electronic field ticketing and automated back-office processing decreases DSO (days sales outstanding), minimizes errors in field tickets and invoices, improves utilization (both employee and equipment), reduces non-billable time and reduces back-office staff. Most of these factors independently lead to a positive payback but the grand total along with the additional qualitative benefits makes the financial justification overwhelmingly positive.
DSO is the time between performing work and getting paid for doing that work. Many factors are not controllable but the time it takes to internally process a field ticket and create invoices from field tickets are totally under an organization’s control. It typically takes more than seven days to manually create a field ticket, approve the field ticket and create an invoice from the field ticket(s). Electronic field ticketing and automated integration to an invoice typically reduces this time to less than one business day. The savings resulting from this reduced time equates to approximately $20,000 per $10 million of revenue, not to mention the approximate $200,000 in positive cash flow.
Almost one-third of manual field tickets have errors resulting in invoice leakage, rework and negative audit results. Electronic field ticketing significantly reduces this error rate and an effective approval work-flow can virtually eliminate errors prior to submitting to a customer for approval and/or payment. Invoice leakage has a direct bottom line impact and is usually more than 2% for manual field tickets or losses of more than $200,000 per $10 million of revenue.
Non-billable time submitted via manual timesheets on a weekly basis is more than 10% higher (usually 25% higher) than non-billable time submitted and reviewed on a daily basis. Electronic timesheets and approval workflow are powerful tools to reduce unnecessary overhead. Non-billable time, like invoice leakage, is a direct bottom line impact. Reducing non-billable time also improves employee utilization. Utilization is further improved via electronic dispatching that is integrated with electronic field ticketing and automated invoicing.
It typically requires one administrative resource to manually process $5 million of field tickets and the corresponding invoices. Electronic field ticketing and automated back-office processing can improve administrative productivity by a factor of three or more. The expense savings related to administrative productivity can be $60,000 or more per $10 million of revenue.
Implementing an electronic field ticketing and automated back-office processing system yields significant financial benefits relative to cost but it also significantly improves quality and controls as well as enables growth.
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