Currently most companies send and receive purchase orders and invoices in paper format. Many companies expend large amounts of resources (human and monetary) in processing the paper documents almost all of which is non-value added. In some cases, the cost of processing a paper purchase order/invoice costs as much as $100/document.

Some companies have also invested significantly in EDI (Electronic Data Interexchange) which may not be used by smaller, less technically sophisticated trading partners.

Some relevant facts about the purchase order transaction processing:

It costs some where between $3 - $4 per document to process via EDI and $10 - $100 per document to process a paper invoice. In most organizations about 10% - 20% of the vendors are communicated via EDI whereas about 80% - 90% of the vendors still use paper documents.