In today’s age, if your accounting staff, managers and CFOs are spending time processing invoice approvals and payments manually, they are diverted from more important work. The old-fashioned accounts payable processes keep your vendors on the overdue payments.
This puts your company at risk and delivers a low-valued level of service to customers. Here’s what your accounts payable processes would look like if cutting-edge technology to automate your accounts payable processes is leveraged:
Accurate Invoice Data Capture and Coding
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This is the most time-consuming element of an AP process, automating this can accelerate the process by three times. Invoices are electrically recorded by taking advantage of optical character recognition and review.
Invoices can be uploaded directly into ERP through API integration with accounts payable solution. This integration can facilitate the easy flow of data back and forth into the systems.
Automating this step reduces many errors resulting from manual entry and prevents the cost of resources to address those errors increasing up to 10 times to the cost of catching them.
Approval Routing
The invoices can be sent directly to the right person for approval based on pre-defined routing rules.
The rules can be defined based on other criteria such as vendor name, and you can set threshold amounts for vendors. Invoices can be routed for approval based on the approval hierarchy. Having the best approval management platform can to a large extent help you to digitize your approvals and reduce costs.
Establishing Controls
Accounts payable processes build the payment controls of paying every single invoice. With 78% of businesses impacted by payments fraud every year, this set of checks and balances is becoming critical than ever.
AP manager can always see the data capture and routing, but it has to be continually reviewed and approved before processing to the payments.
With AP automation, this set of controls can be built into the approval process for every invoice.
AP software makes it easy to set up controls for every invoice created and processed, so you can rest assured that no payment is going beyond your control.
Easy Approvals
Instead of approving each invoice on a separate email, automation enables you to view all outstanding invoices and can be segregated by each department or employee.
All invoices can be approved with a finger tap from a centralized interface, with more details requiring further inspection.
Related: Invoicing with Apps: How You Can Streamline Your Company’s Process
This simplifies the process for your department heads, making it easy to stay on top of required approvals and making it challenging for unpaid invoices to slip through the cracks.
Access to Electronic Payments
Automation makes it easy to process vendor payments. Do you leverage early payment discounts? Automating the approval process makes it easy to make ACH payments.
Do you take advantage of cash-back rebates? While there are many benefits to transit vendor payments to electronic payments, accounts payable solutions facilitate check payments as well.
Whether you choose to pay by check, ACH, credit card, wire or any other payment method, automation can make it simple.
Single-tap Payment
Once payments are set up, the controller or CFOs will be automatically notified. They can authorize the amount and send it to the vendor. With all the information readily available, it can be easy to review the vendor’s payment history.
How AP Automation Changes the Workflow?
Automating the accounts payable process will act as a strategic advantage to your company. Taking a proactive approach to AP can have a profound effect across your enterprise:
Vendor Service
The way you pay your vendors, and the service you provide to customers makes all the difference.
Automation allows you to maintain a strategic relationship with vendors, which can move your business forward.
While manual processing keeps you busy, automation ensures every invoice is paid on time with the best payment method.
Audits Are Simplified
Audits are essential for every company; it helps you check how the accounts payable department records and maintains their invoice data over the year.
Related: Accounting Vs Auditing
If documentation is missing or misplaced, employees will be pulled from tasks to help companies perform their job more efficiently.
Automation makes it easy to conduct audit trails as the information is saved in a centralized repository.
The simplest way is to automate the complete procure-to-pay process. This is where SutiAP can help businesses automate their accounts payable operations.
