Analyzing Invoices, For Funds And Profits

Small businesses need all the competitive advantages they can get when it comes to supply chain efficiencies and protecting margins. And supply chain efficiency can begin at the most basic levels of procurement. Tungsten Network said earlier this month that it has launched a free edition of its spend analytics product, titled Tungsten Network Analytics, in an effort to focus on SMBs and help them gain control over spending across the supply chain. That ties into automated functions, which can help streamline invoicing processes, helping cash flow.

Tungsten Network, which offers global eInvoicing, invoice financing and spend analytics services, said earlier this month that it is rolling out a free edition of its spend analytics offering in an effort to help smaller players in the U.K. gain a better handle on what they spend, how they spend and what trends lie behind their supply chains through examination of data tied to invoices.

In an interview with PYMNTS, Andrew Nichols, who heads Tungsten Network Analytics, said that markets can change quickly, in terms of suppliers’ pricing and even terms, and that even the most diligent firms, if not up to speed with technology, can miss to their own detriment. Consider, he said, orders charged a certain rate one month and then increased the next month for the same product and terms. The advantage of having a network with automated features, said Nichols, “is to mitigate risk,” while sifting through data to pinpoint how spending has evolved over time (and whether such spending is headed in the right or the wrong direction). The free version of the network analytics tool, according to the executive, is to give the firms using that offering a broad view of spending trends, with concentration, for example, among certain currencies or certain suppliers within their networks. It is the higher levels of access, across paid subscriptions, that yield more granular detail, with price discrepancies that may be found across identical products. By way of example, he offered up the cautionary tale of one firm that spent $160 on a mouse, which ordinarily would cost $16, and in this case, the misplaced decimal point had an outsized impact.

That type of Big Data analytics can, through historical invoices across the buyers interacting on the Tungsten Network, save businesses as much as 1–4 percent of spend, which accrues directly to margins. Nichols said his firm’s platform handled £133 billion worth of invoices in 2015, which offers up quite a bit of data for examination.