If you manage Accounts Payable, you make tough decisions every day. Most of them revolve around cost savings, cashflow management, and generating new income. What if three words could help make your decisions easier—Accounts Payable Automation.
You may be thinking, what about the costs, operational disruption, and return on investment? All good points however, every day that your business continues to work with manual AP processes, you’re leaving money on the table.
AP Automation
Payment automation solutions can deliver an immediate increase in efficiency and reduction in operational costs. Benefits include:
- Financial Control
Gain full visibility of your accounts payable activity, 24/7. Buyers have better control over cash flow and timing of supplier payments. Suppliers are paid on time with less risk.
- Heightened Security
Mitigate the risk of payments fraud by establishing concrete approval processes, identifying invoice discrepancies and flagging payment errors.
- Seamless Integration
Improve the AP staff’s experience through system integration and automation of your ERP, invoicing and payment systems. Reduce time and cost eliminating manual processes.
- Faster Reconciliation
Track invoices and payments in real-time with the details required to minimize duplication of invoices, double payments, or lost payments.
- Revenue Generation
Generate new monthly revenue simply by converting check payments to virtual cards.
Other advantages
- Manage invoices and payments at any time, from any location
- Reduce your carbon footprint by going paperless helping your company and the planet
- Minimize check fraud using secure virtual card payments. Losses from check fraud in the US alone totals $18.7B annually
- Strengthen buyer and supplier relationships by consistently paying invoices on time and receiving early pay discounts
Collaboration
Financial institutions and fintechs are working together to offer cutting-edge AP technology to retain customers and improve the customer’s experience. Invoice and payment automation providers are partnering to integrate their systems to offer customers a total AP solution versus a single solution.
AP Challenges
Each industry has unique needs and challenges yet accounts payable functions are similar across all industries. AP automation solutions save time and money, while improving financial controls.
In the media industry, accounts payable and client billing can bog down productivity and efficiency. The more clients, the more paper invoices to sift through. The time it takes to enter, process, and pay invoices has a direct impact on cash flow. Ad platforms expect timely payments. Manual processes can make it difficult to pay suppliers on time. It’s also time consuming to audit ad buys and ensure that money is being well spent and clients are seeing results. The focus should be on clients, not administrative, repetitive tasks.
All businesses have a story like this, and AP automation can help optimize and control accounting in your industry.
System Integration
AP automation isn’t a trend, it’s a necessity. Solutions are being designed with the user experience in mind. System integration offers AP functions from procurement to payment that seamlessly flow together increasing efficiency and reducing costs and risk.
Leader or Follower
Forward thinking companies are looking for ways to transform AP into a touchless environment. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Straight Through Processing (STP) enable AP staff to work on more strategic and revenue generating activities and less time chasing duplicate invoices, lost payments, and long days of reconciliation.
Don’t Wait Any Longer
The digital world will not wait for you. The longer businesses take to automate accounts payable, the more cash, productivity, and competitive advantage is lost. There are many solution providers just waiting to help you automate accounts payable. Now is the time to get started.
