InShip aims for a paperless office by getting rid of supplier’s invoices

The paperless office, is it here at last? InShip, a Dublin based company seems to think so, as they are tackling one of the last hurdles, supplier’s invoices.

Every transaction ends with an invoice, and 99% of businesses proceed to process these documents manually before filing away a paper invoice. In fact, it takes around 10 steps for a company to process an invoice costing in the region of €2 per invoice.

InShip removes the hassle by grabbing a business’s incoming invoices from their supplier’s email, handle the invoice and then upload to your accounts package.

InShip removes the need to, open post, print invoices, sort, send for approval, match to purchase orders, code, input into accounts packages, store or reconcile. As all these tasks are completed online by InShip.

This simple idea came from looking at how large businesses work, and realising that they force their suppliers to work with their systems, and enter or upload invoices directly on the larger company’s system.

Adrian Kelehan, InShip’s founder, saw this while working with a supplier for a large retail UK business at the start of the downturn, not the current downturn but the one in the 1980’s. At the same time his Father was spending hours each week doing a job that he truly hated. Entering his suppliers invoices into his accounts system.

Over the next 25 years, large companies have only increased in size while small business owners have lost 4500 hours completing a thankless, unproductive task that adds little or no value to their business.

A medium sized service business that has used InShip with 50% of it’s suppliers over a six-week period, saved €1250 per week or €1.45 per invoice. This business is one of many that InShip hope to switch to an automated and system and take part in the bookkeeping revolution.

InShip is at the fore of the FinTech revolution with the company already disrupting the traditional way of manually processing invoices. Enterprise Ireland has recognised the growth potential of InShip, and they have also gone through the DIT’s new frontiers programme.  InShip is set to keep growing in 2016, having created 3 full time positions and acquiring new businesses on an ongoing basis.

The bookkeeping revolution has well and truly begun.