Those who manage catering or inflight services for an airline know intimately that few jobs come with more complexity. Ensuring that every flight, across every aircraft type and configuration, has the right catering uplift loaded onboard requires an incredible number of moving parts—and an extreme level of detail.
Add to this complexity the sheer number of catering vendors, each with their own invoicing methods, varying taxes, and negotiated pricing, and it’s little wonder that discrepancies occur when it’s time to pay the bill. In our experience, this has resulted in overpayments to vendors to the tune of 2% or more of an airline’s annual catering spend.
Correcting these errors is no simple feat, either, particularly because performing periodic spot checks is still the industry’s standard method of auditing invoices. This “pay, then pursue” model is not only costly to airlines, but it’s also a monumental task in itself—because it’s largely still performed manually or with minimal tech.
What if invoice reconciliation were easier, more automated, and more reliable?
It can be. With a single source of truth between airlines and their vendors, inflight services managers can pay their invoices without hesitation.
The Paxia Catering Management platform brings airlines and vendors onto the same page. In fact, our invoicing module integrates with both the caterer’s Accounts Receivable system and the airline’s Accounts Payable system, so both have common visibility.