Why dematerialize your sales administration processes in 2025?

Adapt your sales administration to the 2025 market

In 2024, the digital transformation of businesses continues to accelerate, driven by technological advances and the need to optimize internal processes. Sales administration (ADV) is not immune to this scourge. The 2020 health crisis acted as a catalyst, forcing companies to rethink their organization and adopt digital solutions to guarantee the continuity of their activities and responsiveness to their customers.

Forecasts for 2025 show that companies that have not started or completed this transformation risk falling behind their competitors. In fact, 34% of companies have already automated more than half of their manual processes! And your competitors are undoubtedly among them!

In 2025, companies that adopt dematerialization solutions will be better equipped to face market challenges and improve their performance. What's more, only 1 year until mandatory electronic invoicing comes into force!

What is the role of the ADV service?

Sales administration (SA) is at the heart of the commercial operation of many companies. This service manages the entire sales cycle, from order taking to invoicing and payment tracking. He is the main interface between the sales teams, logistics and customers.

The tasks of an ADV service include managing orders, creating and sending invoices, handling customer disputes, tracking inventory, following up on payments and reporting sales performance. This service also plays a strategic role in ensuring that transactions take place efficiently and smoothly, directly impacting customer satisfaction and the financial health of the company.

Which tasks can be dematerialized?

Today, almost all ADV tasks can be dematerialized thanks to digital solutions such as GEDs (Electronic Document Management). Here are some examples:

Order management : Orders can be entered, validated and tracked online via integrated management systems (ERP) or specific platforms.
Electronic invoicing : Invoices can be automatically generated from orders, sent electronically, and integrated into accounting systems.
Monitoring of payments and automatic reminders : certain tools such as EDM allow you to automate reminders in the event of late payment, with automated notifications.
Dispute management : Complaints can be monitored and resolved via collaborative platforms, ensuring complete traceability of exchanges.
Analysis and reporting : Business Intelligence (BI) tools allow you to generate instant reports on sales, performance, and forecasts.
Archiving : Dematerialization allows secure electronic archiving, accessible at any time, thus reducing costs linked to physical storage space.

The advantages of dematerializing your sales administration processes

In 2025, dematerializing its processes will become necessary to guarantee smooth, secure and error-free sales management, because in fact, several advantages are offered by this transition:

Time saving and efficiency : Repetitive tasks such as manual data entry into the information system, issuing invoices, filing or payment reminders can be automated. Time is thus freed up for missions with higher added value. Moreover, company accounting departments spend on average 30% of their time entering invoices manually, while dematerialized processing would represent 50 to 75% time savings compared to paper processing. (source DocuWare)
Error Reduction : Manual entry is prone to human error. Dematerialization makes it possible to reduce the risk of typos, forgetfulness, or invoicing errors by up to 90% (source: AIIM, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Forrester Research). Automating your processes also makes it possible to detect other types of errors such as duplicates, discrepancies through reconciliation, etc.

Better internal and customer collaboration : Instant access to information shared in real time facilitates coordination between different departments (commerce, logistics, finance) and improves responsiveness to customer requests.
Improved customer satisfaction : Faster and more accurate processing of orders and disputes contributes to a better customer experience, essential for loyalty.
Increased tracking and traceability : Tools like EDM make it possible to track every step of the sales process, ensuring better transparency and traceability. Beyond the stages of a process, the EDM also allows you to have a visualization of the modifications made by each person to a contractual document such as a quote. This provides irrefutable proof in the event of bad faith on the part of the client or vice versa, for example.
Legal compliance : With the rise of regulations such as mandatory electronic invoicing for businesses in Europe, dematerialization helps to remain compliant with legal requirements, particularly in terms of document management and archiving. As such, 55% of companies believe that they will benefit from compliance with regulations on electronic invoicing to improve their process. (Source: White Paper – Automation for the new role of financial management)

The risks of sticking to the traditional paper process

Companies that persist in maintaining ADV processes based on paper tools or obsolete systems expose themselves to numerous risks:

Reduced productivity: Maintaining paper in your sales administration process leads to perpetuating numerous time-consuming tasks (entrying, filing, etc.). Unfortunately, this also means exposing yourself to a 21.3% drop in productivity of your teams, in particular because of the psychological fatigue that this laborious work causes, especially when the number of documents to be processed is significant. (Source: DocuWare – “Ditch Paper” Guide)
Input errors : Manual entry increases the risk of errors in orders, invoices or reminders, which can lead to late payments, disputes or lost customers.

Forgotten reminders and financial losses : Without automation, payment reminders can be forgotten, which leads to delays or unpaid debts. Poor management of receivables directly impacts the company's cash flow. In France, the amount of late payments is estimated at 20 billion euros, and is accounted for 80% by SMEs/VSEs and 20% by mid-sized companies. (source DocuWare)
Lack of visibility and traceability : Manual document processing makes it more difficult to track information, which can lead to delays or poor communication between departments.
Inability to respond quickly to market changes : Companies that have not adopted digitalized processes risk being overtaken by the competition, particularly in terms of responsiveness and adaptability.
Cost : According to Gartner , businesses spend an average of 1-3% of their revenue on document printing. There are also the costs of archiving, mailing and storing documents, as well as the cost of the paper itself. For example, a company with around a hundred employees spends between €10,000 and €25,000 each year for its internal paper consumption and equipment maintenance.
Legal non-compliance : With laws strengthening around the dematerialization of invoices and commercial documents, businesses that have not anticipated these changes risk fines or sanctions. As a reminder, mandatory electronic invoicing will come into force in 2026!

The winning trio: DocuWare, Docu'SalesFlow & Docu'Analytics

In order to implement dematerialization within your company, certain tools such as the DocuWare EDM are essential. Indeed, the DocuWare solution allows you to securely capture, organize and archive documents (invoice, quote, contract, deposit, etc.) and automates all of your business processes. By removing the tedious manual tasks and hassle of using shared folders and directories, you free up time to focus on important activities.

Once your processes have been dematerialized, it is time to optimize your sales administration processes with DocuSales'Flow . As a preconfigured module for DocuWare, Docu'SalesFlow centralizes all of your commercial files and accelerates all of your ADV processes by automating personalized sendings for invoice, quote or contract reminders. By SMS, by telephone, by email or by post, you are in charge of choosing the means of communication best suited to your customer.

The Docu'SalesFlow module is not limited to that, it gives your customers the possibility of:

Sign your contracts electronically for faster customer feedback by avoiding the long process of mail exchanges.
securely online

The return on investment is rapid since one of our clients reported a 50% reduction in their customer outstandings in 3 months!

Coupled with the Docu'Analytics , it offers management of the ADV process via the design of dashboards and invoicing indicators allowing you to analyze your document flows and evaluate the operational efficiency of the service. sales administration.

Example of billing tracking indicators:

Payment due date
Payment deadlines
Evolutions N vs N-1
Collections
Types of disputes

And much more!

The future belongs to those who dematerialize their sales administration processes

In 2025, the dematerialization of sales administration processes will no longer be a simple asset, but a necessity to remain competitive. Companies that choose to digitize their ADV processes will benefit from greater efficiency, reduced errors and simplified management of their sales cycle. Those who cling to traditional methods risk losing competitiveness, responsiveness and customer satisfaction. It is therefore crucial to anticipate this transformation and invest in digital solutions such as DocuWare and its preconfigured modules to approach the future with confidence.