E-billing adopters find rewards

Network World - For a company switching from paper to electronic invoicing methods, one obvious savings potential is mailing costs -- no more bills to print or postage to purchase.

But there are a lot more savings to be gleaned by going electronic, users say. For Health Alliance Medical Plans Inc. in Urbana, Ill., key savings come from expedited dispute management processes.

Because Health Alliance bills its corporate customers in advance, accurate invoices are a rarity. Typically, corporate customers have a change to report -- an employee to add to or remove from their health plan coverage, for example.

Within Health Alliance, reconciling these changes used to be a manual, time-consuming process. "In the past, companies would write in or cross out people on their paper bill," says Traci Kleinert, director of billing, enrollment and cash services at the benefits provider. Inside Health Alliance, the accounts receivables department would log that information and pass it along to the benefits eligibility department for manual processing.

"It's those hand-offs that caused so much time delays -- when multiple departments wound up having to pass around information," Kleinert says.

Today, account reconciliation is done online, thanks to Avolent Inc.'s BizCast suite. The software aggregates eligibility, billing history and account status information from Health Alliance's back-end claims and gives customers online access to the data so they can modify rosters, approve invoices and resolve disputes online.

With BizCast, Health Alliance has cut back on billing costs, reduced billing-related calls to its customer service agents and accelerated the payment process.

It puts customers in charge of reconciliations, Kleinert says. Customers can add members to their invoices, pay for those members online and drop members from their invoices. The software adjusts invoice totals as employees are added or dropped, and customers can pay the adjusted total. "We're able to see what they paid, and why they paid it," Kleinert says.

On the postage and printing front, BizCast also saves Health Alliance money -- particularly given the size of the company's old paper bills. "The bills that we sent out, they're not one or two pages, they're 20 or 30 pages," Kleinert says.

Staging a comeback

BizCast is an example of e-billing software, more formally known as electronic invoice presentment and payment (EIPP) technology. EIPP products automate the invoicing and payment process with Web-based tools for delivering bills, moving cash and reconciling accounts among business trading partners.

It's not a new market: E-billing start-ups were a darling of the Internet bubble, until the burst put several out of business or