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Innovative Discount System Created With DirectInvoice
Our legal department at Atlantic Bank of New York was looking for an electronic invoicing system to make our outside counsel billing process more manageable. What we found was new technology and software that enabled us not only to improve the overall efficiency of our system but also to implement an invoice discounting policy that saves us money and gets our outside counsel paid quickly. The discounting policy lets us reduce payments to outside counsel by a set percentage if we pay their bills within 20 days and reduces the fees further in the event of late invoice submission. Because the new invoicing system lets us turn invoices around so quickly, we have achieved such significant savings that we expect the invoicing system to pay for itself within just a few years.
The technology that made this possible is DirectInvoice.com from Tripoint Systems Development Corporation. As executive vice president and general counsel, I was responsible for selecting new matter tracking and electronic invoicing systems for the bank's legal department. With the help of Deloitte & Touche, I identified the needs of my department and the bank, assessed a number of systems and finally settled on DirectInvoice. Our legal department had installed a matter management system in the early 1990s, but by 2002 that system was outdated. We wanted a more advanced, more sophisticated system offering an array of features that would increase the amount, quality and efficiency of our work. Most importantly, we wanted an electronic invoicing system to replace our manual paper system, which was labor-intensive and time-consuming.
Previously, a bill would come into the legal department and be sent to the business contact for the matter. The business contact would then prepare a payment request form and do some data entry to keep some of the billing information in the business unit. Next, the business contact would take the bill and the form and send it to the legal department, where we would do our own data entry. The invoice was finally sent to our accounts payable area, whose personnel would complete another round of data entry and finally send out a check. With the new e-invoicing technology, there is no paper and much less manual data entry in the payment process.
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