The environment for the accounts payable department is growing more difficult. You’re being asked to perform more than ever before while preserving flexibility to accommodate organizational development, changing work environments, and remote work. You can’t afford to let any of these things slip—accurate payments, controls, compliance, and insight into your AP operation are all crucial. In this blog, We’ll go through why you should think about AP automation now and how it can help you meet your AP operating needs.
In this blog, we will discuss:
- Visibility - Understanding where your bills are in the process, what the next steps are, and maintaining constant visibility into your AP process is all-important.
- Control – Reducing operational risk and promoting your organization's financial health.
- Scalability – The ability of your automation solution to grow and change in response to the needs of your business.
Making it Crystal Clear
Highly manual AP departments typically process about 10,000 invoices approval per person per year, according to an IOFM study of nearly 400 AP practices conducted between 2017 and 2019. However, if the AP team is small and the business grows, that volume can quickly become unmanageable. The day-to-day workload distracts you from key strategic tasks, but the bills must be paid. And, more than ever, AP departments require the ability to perform the same tasks from any location.
Keeping the Track
Moreover, Keeping track of where the bills are in the process is one of the most difficult challenges for many organizations. Who owns them? Who is supposed to be approving them but isn’t? What’s the snag? A manual system provides no insight into the AP process. Instead, it creates black holes in which invoices disappear, become stalled, and are not paid on time. Aside from digging through files and hoping to find the missing document, there is no efficient way to retrieve information about a specific invoice or vendor. Numerous emails and phone calls for assistance from people who may have seen it waste time for the entire organization may not even produce useful results.
And if some invoices have an exemption from approval, it is often impossible to say that the AP specialist does not memorize the manual setup. For something which ought to have accelerated, this can mean delayed payment.
As a result, several businesses adopted an automated payment solution and invoice automation that provided complete transparency, including the ability to see where everything was in the process, who had handled it, and where it was stalled. The solution’s two-way communication allowed for deep understanding and collaboration between AP and approvers to get items paid on time. Rather than depending on countless back-and-forth messages that got lost in her inbox, she was able to see all of her team’s ongoing conversations in a single view, in a single application—complete with pertinent screenshots and document attachments.
This was further strengthened by a fully linked mobile app that included all of the same features, allowing everyone to stay on top of pending invoices, even if some employees were on the road.
Staying in Control
Control and compliance are critical considerations for sustaining your company’s financial health, but they’re often forgotten in a rush to keep up with manual invoice payments. However, managing operational risks with a small staff can be extremely difficult. A manual procedure, at its most basic level, carries a high risk of making a mistake. Even if everything is in order, it’s all too simple to pay the same invoice twice, especially if you asked for a resend because you couldn’t locate the original. Because it takes so long to check that every invoice hasn’t already been paid, manual operations rarely do so—and then pay it again.
Automation, on the other hand, simplifies the procedure. Once you’ve entered the invoice into the system, it recognizes it and won’t let you make a duplicate payment. The best performers in this area can keep duplicate payments to less than 1% of the time, while the worst performers issue duplicates payments more than 3% of the time. This can be prohibitively pricey.
Not only should an automated system prevent duplicate payments, but it should also be able to handle exceptions. Utility and mobile bills, for example, may need to be paid straight away to guarantee that services are maintained without having to go through the typical approval routing process. The software must be able to recognize and manage those bills correctly.
Your ROI
Automation isn’t only about efficiency; the savings in terms of error reduction and compliance should more than compensate for the costs. Those who automate their processes can lower their per-invoice processing costs by nearly half.
Get In Touch
With targeted automation, top-performing small-to-medium-sized businesses may more than treble their per-person invoice processing.
You get tangible benefits that go right to the bottom line by considerably enhancing productivity and reducing invoice processing costs. It becomes a good business decision when combined with increased compliance and control, which reduces the risk of penalties and fraud. Furthermore, if you need professional help or guidance for Microsoft Dynamics 365 accounts payable workflow or vendor invoice automation d365, DHRP has the team to help you with it.
