Fahy stresses that many solutions are competing to automate the financial supply chain. "You have SAP, Oracle and other ERP suppliers providing an alternative solution and the banks and logistics suppliers have a vital interest. Another solution is provided by P-Cards, chargeable to Amex, VISA or MasterCard. If I order stationery, I don't want the expense of invoice processing, and I plan to use P-Cards for purchases up to US$1,000 in future."

ERP vendors

ERP vendors may focus less on the EIPP and supply chain processes than the specialist companies, but they handle bread-and-butter invoice receipts. For example, Intentia M3, now part of the greatly expanded global Lawson Software Group, provides financial modules with many payment functions.

"Our M3 system receives thousands of invoices from suppliers, that may be sent by some electronic media, by fax or post," said Graham Young, solutions design consultant for finance, APAC. "We can take paper invoices into finance through scanning with smart OCR (Optical Character Recognition) that indicates the uncertainty of hard to recognize data."

Global adoption of electronic finances is difficult because there are still geographical pockets where physical documents are required by law, said Graham Young. "In Poland, for example, documents have to be paper, bearing a watermarked stamp or frank, to be legal."