6 Proven Ways to Manage Invoices Digitally and Cut Processing Time for Your Team

Manual invoicing is holding you back.

If you’re stuck chasing paper invoices or sorting through endless emails, you’re not alone. I know it’s a hassle—lost paperwork, data entry mistakes, and approvals that drag on for days.

Over time, I’ve seen how these little headaches snowball into bigger problems like slow payments, unhappy vendors, and missed opportunities to grow your team.

According to HighRadius, 68% of companies still rely on manual invoice processing while 41% are eyeing automation for 2025. Honestly, that’s a huge sign that there’s room to get ahead if you act now.

But here’s what I’ve found—you can dramatically speed up everything by embracing the right digital strategies for invoice management.

In this article, I’m going to break down exactly how to manage invoices digitally by covering key steps that’ll help you save time, boost accuracy, and gain more control over your process.

You’ll walk away knowing how to reduce stress, free up your team, and make your invoice workflow work for you—not against you.

Let’s get started.

1. Automate Invoice Data Capture

Manual data entry is slowing your accounts payable down

If you’re still entering invoice details by hand, lost time and data errors start adding up fast.

I’ve noticed that when tasks like invoice capture are handled manually, there’s so much room for mistakes and rework and that usually means frustrated staff and unhappy vendors.

In 2024, the share of manually keyed invoices dropped from 85% to 60%, proving automation is catching on quickly for a reason, according to 60% of invoices are manually entered from DOKKA. This kind of shift shows how most businesses are tired of wasting resources and want a smarter approach.

If you want to reduce risks and get payments out on time, automating this step is a game changer.

Automated invoice capture can fix this problem.

The idea here is simple: by using a document management tool that scans and extracts invoice data for you, the errors and delays fade into the background.

You can actually see real results when you let software handle repetitive data entry instead of your team, freeing up everyone for more valuable tasks.

Take OCR (optical character recognition) as an example—it’ll read details from PDFs or scanned receipts and push them straight into your accounting system. This kind of tool is at the center of managing or processing invoices digitally, because it does the heavy lifting in seconds and keeps your records accurate and audit-ready.

That’s why automation has become the first step.

It’s fast, accurate, and essential if you need your invoice workflow to scale as your business grows.

Ready to streamline your invoice process? Start a FREE trial of FileCenter today and see how automation can free your team from manual data entry.

2. Streamline Your Digital Approvals

Too many people get stuck waiting for approvals

Manual approval workflows drag out invoice processing, creating slowdowns that frustrate your team.

What usually happens is the back-and-forth emails make it really easy to lose track of invoice status and responsibility. This isn’t just annoying – it’s risky when you’re facing tight deadlines or audits.

There’s a reason why 68% of finance professionals surveyed say they want AI to streamline approval and payment steps. IFOL shared this demand to highlight how much smoother things could run once you ditch manual bottlenecks.

You can cut those delays and stop tiptoeing around missing signatures once you have the right setup, so let’s look at how to solve it.

You could revamp your approvals system fast.

With a digital workflow tool, your invoice approval process becomes trackable, transparent, and way less dependent on email chains.

Every step gets clear: no more lost invoices or mystery hold-ups that hurt cash flow and vendor relationships.

For instance, you might assign multi-level approvals with real-time notifications so anyone can handle their part without chasing people down or wondering where to look. This shows exactly how to manage invoices digitally and shrink the time your team wastes waiting around for reviews, usually from days to minutes.

That’s the kind of upgrade your team deserves.

Bonus: you keep every approval action logged and auditable, which is essential for compliance and makes reporting to leadership a breeze.

3. Centralize All Invoice Documents

Invoices scattered everywhere cause needless frustration and delays.

If you’re still storing invoices in email threads, shared drives, or even on paper, you know how quickly they disappear or get overlooked.

What I notice when things aren’t centralized is invoices get misplaced, key documents go missing, and you spend way too long tracking down the files leadership or auditors want at crunch time.

According to DocuClipper, 65% of large businesses have implemented automated invoice data entry systems to improve efficiency and centralization. Centralization isn’t optional anymore if you want your process to scale without chaos.

If finding documents always feels like a frantic search, you’re already wasting resources and risking missed payments.

Bringing every invoice into one secure place fixes this fast.

When you centralize all invoice documents in a document management platform, you suddenly get total visibility, super-fast lookups, and peace of mind on compliance. It’s one of the best changes I’ve made for teams who want to manage everything digitally.

With all your files together, it’s so much easier to set up approval workflows or even automate data capture, which you already discussed under the point on automation above.

No more siloed folders or confusing email attachments slowing you down or putting data at risk.

For example, dropping your invoices into a searchable digital repository means you can instantly pull what you need for audits, see any document’s status, and keep vendors happy. If you’re wondering how to manage invoices digitally without drowning in admin, centralizing is the big win that’s hard to skip.

Simple, but such a game changer.

You save your team time, reduce costly errors, and build a foundation for scaling every step of your accounts payable process.

4. Integrate With Your ERP System

Keeping your systems in sync can feel impossible.

When your ERP isn’t talking to your invoice management solution, you end up copying data back and forth. That’s a recipe for errors, missed payments, and major headaches.

If you’re stuck juggling disconnected tools, mistakes will eventually happen and frustrations pile up for your finance team. I’ve seen delayed approvals, lost invoice records, and endless reconciliation issues—all of which slow down processing.

Capterra reports that AI-powered OCR at accuracy rates reaching the high 90% range now lets you convert digital invoices straight into your ERP, keeping operations moving. This saves so much time for finance teams who need reliable data.

If efficient, secure, and quick processing is your goal, integration is non-negotiable.

Connecting these systems doesn’t have to be hard.

Bringing your invoice management and ERP system together practically eliminates duplicate entry and speeds up every step, from intake to payment. It’s one of the biggest ways to reliably manage invoices digitally.

Linking your document management software with ERP brings every invoice, status, and update into one workflow, cutting approval bottlenecks. You can also set up automated posting, real-time status updates, and audit trails for full transparency.

A connected invoice pipeline just makes sense.

This approach is great if you want something scalable that cuts risks, saves time, and sets your team up to handle even more invoices as your business grows.

5. Enable Vendor Self-Service Portals

Is vendor communication eating up your day?

If your team is always fielding invoice questions and manual payment status requests, it feels like you’re stuck in a loop.

What usually happens is that with no self-service option for vendors, your team gets bogged down in endless phone calls and emails. This wastes valuable time, increases the risk of miscommunication, and leaves both you and your suppliers frustrated.

According to The Accounts Payable Network, [85% reduction in customer service calls] for small organizations happens when vendor portals are rolled out, with a 78% drop reported by large organizations. That frees up your staff for more strategic work, not just chasing down paperwork. (source)

When vendor requests clog up your AP workflow, it’s a signal to look for a smarter fix.

Vendor self-service portals are a game changer here.

With a good portal, your suppliers can log in anytime to check invoice submission status, validate payment dates, or update their details. This hands-off approach frees your team from repetitive communication while helping you manage invoices digitally the smart way.

Allowing vendors direct access to their records pretty much eliminates back-and-forth emails, cutting down on confusion and giving everyone real-time insights.

What I like is that modern portals are easy to roll out alongside your document management software—no rip-and-replace required. For example, you can grant permission-based access so vendors only see what’s relevant to them, and set up auto-notifications for invoice approvals or rejections.

It’s practical and scalable.

Empowering vendors with self-service is a solid fix for both your pain points and theirs, giving you more time, boosting accuracy, and driving better supplier relationships.

Ready to cut invoice processing time? Start a FREE trial of FileCenter today and see how easily you can transform your vendor communication.

6. Utilize Advanced Analytics Tools

Is your reporting slowing down invoice processing?

Without the right data, it’s tough to spot what’s stalling your payment cycles or costing your team wasted hours.

A lot of people try to make sense of their process by digging through spreadsheets, but that’s time-consuming and often means you’re missing out on big-picture insight that could drive smarter decisions.

One thing that stands out—according to KPI Depot, companies that leveraged customer self-service analytics cut support inquiries by 20% after boosting portal adoption from 45% to 75%. So just think about the time and stress you could save by having better analytics right in your system.

If you want to tighten up your reporting and stop chasing information, there’s a more effective way.

Advanced analytics really change the game here.

When you bring in analytics tools, you finally get a live view into what’s working or slowing things down—including bottlenecks, delayed approvals, and recurring errors.

Real-time dashboards give you instant insight into key metrics like invoice status, cycle time, or staff workload. If you want to see which vendors take the longest to process or which step causes most delays, analytics can answer this quickly—something you simply can’t do with manual tracking.

That’s how you make progress.

With analytics, you get details you can actually act on, which makes it much easier for your team to handle bigger volumes and cut problem-solving time down.

Conclusion

Manual invoicing is holding you back.

Lost paperwork, slow approvals, and constant errors drain your small team’s energy every single day.

Here’s something worth thinking about—DocuClipper reports that 86% of small and medium-sized businesses manually enter invoice data, so there’s still a huge unmet opportunity for digital invoicing software adoption right now. If you move early, you can get ahead of competitors still buried in admin.

There’s a way to fix this.

By using these six steps, you can finally clear up those clunky processes, reduce mistakes, and actually get your invoices paid on time.

Real progress happens once you see how to manage invoices digitally—not just to save hours each week, but to give your small business space to grow and take on bigger goals.

Try setting up your first automated capture tool and watch what changes.

Less hassle, more control, and happier staff await you.

Ready to experience smoother invoicing? I’ll start a FREE trial of FileCenter to see how it can simplify your digital invoice management today.