Actionable ways to Improve your Accounts Payable Processes

As an organization grows, its processes must grow with it. Common across many industries, businesses often find themselves juggling multiple disparate data sets across numerous systems, resulting in a lot of wasted time and resources. If you want to streamline your accounts payable process, you need to fix that.

Start by looking at the redundancies, bottlenecks, and inefficiencies in your accounts payable process. An easy way to do this is by visually mapping out workflows with your team and identifying dead ends or areas where there isn’t clear ownership. Pose the question: what would a more streamlined system look like? Does your process look like an assembly line or a subway map of New York City? Hopefully, you can identify areas that are unnecessarily complex and begin simplifying workflows.

Data entry errors can ruin any hope of streamlining your accounts payable process. As one of the most common reasons for data entry errors, manual entry mistakes (even those that seem small) add up costing companies time and money when trying to correct them or dealing with the fallout. The more human hands you have on a process, the greater risk you have of errors occurring – not to mention the hours you can reallocate to more value-added tasks.

The impact of paper invoicing is severe and far-reaching, so addressing this portion of the process is critical. Physical, paper invoices not only result in substantial delays in receiving, processing and approving invoices, but also leave your process open to errors, exceptions and increased risk. Receiving business documents in an electronic format such as email, PDF, or through a business network are simple ways to abandon paper, readily keep documents organized and secure, and access them with ease.

If you send or receive PDF invoices via email, you’ve reduced your paper consumption. But you’re not e-invoicing. If you’re using a scan and capture solution, you’re still processing needless paperwork. And using PDF invoices, which have to be scanned and captured using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology, is basically like dealing with paper. While a PDF attached to an e-mail is an improvement over receiving a paper document, it still doesn’t deliver the full benefits of e-invoicing.

This one may seem obvious, but as already mentioned above, unnecessary complexity, unclear ownership, manual data entry and reliance on paper offers a big area of opportunity for duplicate and late payments. As one of the main steps within accounts payable, PO to invoice matching can be one of the main culprits for slowing down payments and missing important information. Automating this portion of the process to automatically match POs, goods receipts, and any other required matching points, ensures on-time payments and potential early payment discounts.

Manual processes and stacks of paper eventually lead to data siloes that inevitably break up transparency in your business, making it harder to fully analyze company spend. Organizations with decentralized payables operations, disparate financial systems, and manual processes often find they lack easy access to their financial data. Or, where data is available, it is often incomplete or inaccurate. Without one clear view of your purchasing process, you’re opening yourself up to risk and multiple inefficiencies and visibility into transactions, suppliers and spend is effectively impossible.