Consider how much of your everyday business can be done without paperwork. If you want to fly, for example, you can do everything from booking your seat to gaining clearance to board the aircraft using just your cell phone. In contrast, many national and multinational real estate companies still generate, circulate and approve invoices using paper and manual routing. This highly inefficient process is costly, time-consuming and contrary to prevailing environmental sensibilities. A paper invoice can cost as much as € 4 to generate and route by air and ground transport. The cost of processing it can set the recipient back anywhere from € 15 to € 30 because he or she often has to rekey the information into his or her own database, then route it to multiple approvers. There can be dozens of touchpoints, each one of which consumes resources and presents opportunities for error. And that’s just one document. Multiply this sequence by the hundreds or thousands of vendors and partners some real estate firms deal with. This approach to invoice processing doesn’t just seem outdated with the potential to drag a business down – it is. Payables made easy Real estate companies’ profit margins might remain slender through the COVID-19 era. Besides that, tenants, investors, communities and regulators are imposing increasingly stringent environmental performance standards for businesses. These developments might inspire real estate companies in Europe to consider replacing the manual steps – and paper – in the accounts payable process with advanced software applications that scan invoices into electronic files, route them to approvers and pay suppliers with electronic funds transfer. This approach can sharply reduce costs as well as the material and energy required to create and move paper invoices to their various destinations. In fact, savings of...