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The idea of democratizing the functions of invoicing and payments is about as foreign to most enterprises as displaying all their business data on a Facebook page. Accounts payable and accounts receivable have always been among the most impenetrable data silos in business, and they’ve needed a makeover for decades.
That’s exactly why Viewpost went into business two years ago: to make such accounting easier and more effective for the enterprise and its contractors. Viewpost removes the barriers businesses face during the exchange of invoices and payments by connecting them via a secure business network.
In fact, the cloud-based Viewpost app enables invoicing free of charge, streamlines the process so people get paid and the books get settled faster, and saves time and money for both parties.
The Maitland, Fla.-based company has been so successful in a short time that it already has signed a number of impressive clients, with the latest, announced Nov. 5, being U.S. Bancorp. U.S. Bancorp has $247 billion in assets and is the parent company of U.S. Bank, the sixth largest commercial bank in the United States.
U.S. Bank has made this solution available to all of its 1.5 million existing small business members. The Viewpost network is free to join and enables any size company to securely connect with any trading partner to send, receive and manage electronic invoices and payments.
“There’s long been a fundamental problem with the way businesses exchange invoices, payments and information,” Viewpost CEO and founder Max Eliscu, as well as founder of LSQ Funding Group, told eWEEK. “Time is wasted between transactions, and thus money is lost. In the U.S. alone, this problem costs businesses billions annually, not to mention the lost opportunity and waste of what everyone at Viewpost believes is most precious of all—time.”
The problem? “Accounts receivable and accounts payable departments, and the systems they run on, are silos—mine is for me, yours is for you, and neither talks to one another,” Eliscu wrote in a blog post. “Never mind that my receivables are your payables, and vice versa. As a result, paper invoices and checks persist—an obvious, stubborn and annoying symptom for lack of interoperability.
“Big corporations invest millions trying to keep up, and yet the success of these systems is utterly dependent on convincing trading partners to behave uniquely for the benefit of each of their large customers. A clear shout out to the days of ‘good for you’ and ‘bad for me.’ Let’s face it, the status quo isn’t scalable or sustainable due to the barriers.”
So Viewpost offers its cloud subscription service on a secure network that’s free to join and eliminates the usual barriers to adoption, such as buying hardware, cost complexity and lack of IT sophistication. Connecting to the network and using the service requires no purchase of new software or hardware, no consumption of IT resources—and no change to existing business processes.
To date, Viewpost has processed more than $14 billion in invoices and payments, Eliscu said.
Viewpost offers its free cloud invoicing to attract customers, then makes its money on additional services. Go here to see details.