Travelport achieves substantial cost savings and improved visibility into invoicing process

Prior to 2012, Travelport’s Accounts Receivable teams dedicated a number of staff in and several hours per day to manually send invoices by post in each country. Printing invoices and address labels, checking details, and then stuffing, franking and posting thousands of envelopes each day was a costly, time-consuming process.

Travelport felt it was time to seek out a more cost-effective solution, while also freeing up the AR team to ensure balances were collected in an accurate and timely manner, improving financial efficiency.

Beyond the need to improve cost-efficiency, customer demand for e-invoicing was growing. Customers had begun to request a variety of invoice formats – printed, emailed and/or self-service downloads from a portal. In addition to these needs, Travelport needed to comply with legislation that mandated the use of qualified digital certificates to support electronic invoices.

Travelport’s first steps into e-invoicing were a deployment of an early Pitney Bowes solution. However, after a few months, it became apparent that simply creating PDFs of invoices and distributing as email attachments didn’t meet their needs. At this point, Travelport turned to Corcentric as a more complete solution trusted by large businesses across the world.

Travelport initially deployed Corcentric in just one country, but has since rolled out the solution to 38 countries with the intention to add more in the future.

“The cost-reduction, and improvement in customer experience, made Corcentric an obvious solution to roll out across more countries.”

The substantial cost savings from deploying Corcentric have been the main benefit, but improved visibility and control over the invoicing process, as well as improved customer service has made a real difference to Travelport.

According to industry expert Bruno Koch from Billentis, sending electronic invoices, rather than paper, saves over $6.20 (£4.70) per invoice. So Travelport’s monthly distribution of over 25,000 electronic invoices presented a significant opportunity for them to save on expenditure while improving cash flow.

“We probably weren’t the easiest of clients, but Corcentric have been very flexible and ensured we received a solution tailored to our needs across a large number of countries.”

Travelport has a reputation of technology leadership to uphold, so selecting an e-invoicing solution that mirrors their technical excellence made perfect sense. The modernization of Travelport’s invoicing process has not only saved money, but protected their brand reputation.

Cost-saving and efficiency improvement is felt beyond the immediate benefit to the Accounts Receivable team. Fewer customer service calls are received, due to the fact that customers can self-service and download invoices directly from their portal.