By Dan Berthiaume

Hourglass

Basware survey data of 558 global SMB owners and employees with financial responsibility shows that average SMB employee spends 16 hours and 53 minutes per month on financial processes, equating to two full working days on activity unrelated to their role. Of those two days spent on financial processes, the most time-consuming exercises include responding to supplier/customer inquiries (two hours and 19 minutes), creating and sending invoices (one hour and 55 minutes) and reviewing invoices to be paid (one hour and 45 minutes).

Furthermore, 38 percent of U.S. SMB owners do not believe their company has a clear procedure for approving invoices to be paid and 52 percent of U.S. SMB employees don’t believe their company has a clear process to handle unpaid invoices, which can lead to cashflow issues. Forty percent of U.S. SMBs still manually process invoices, which is a staggeringly high percentage in this digital age. And even as SMBs grow larger and implement automated invoice processing systems, they are still likely to do business with other small organizations that still manually handle invoices, causing more slowdowns in their management of financial processes.

Managed Financial Services, From the Inside Out

Looking at the survey results, the biggest financial process-related challenges facing SMBs are outward-facing activities. That is, responding to supplier and customer inquiries and performing various tasks related to tracking and processing invoices. Therefore, it makes sense for MSPs serving the SMB market to launch their managed financial processing services offerings (if they don’t already have one in place) in these areas. Invoicing in particular seems to be a major stumbling block for many SMBs, and MSPs can offer economies of scale and cloud-based service delivery that could make managed invoice services attractive even to companies that have invoice automation systems in place or the wherewithal to implement them. In addition, managed invoice services also remove the onus of dealing with partners that still use manual invoicing systems off the SMB client and onto the MSP, who should be more equipped to handle this inconvenience.