If you have a business, you might have seen the benefits of Accounts Payable Software or popularly known as AP Automation. AP Automation is the digital format and automation of manual tasks in the accounts payable process. It helps one minimize the repetitive and tedious manual work to make time available for more revenue-driving tasks. Moreover, both the manual and semi-manual AP processes can be fully automated, saving time and increasing control.
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What are the benefits of AP Automation?
AP Automation makes your working life smarter, easier, and more efficient. A few of the opportunities that automation provides are as follows:
- Eliminates manual hard work typically involving in invoice processing
- Invoice processing costs are pretty low
- Helps in improving relationships with your supplier
- Increases control and reduce risk by minimizing errors
- Increase business agility and stay operational from anywhere
- Gain a competitive edge and evolve your business toward the future
- Grow your business without adding more staff
- Reduce your carbon footprint by incorporating sustainability throughout your organization
- Gain spend visibility with access to high-quality invoice data in real-time
- Achieve faster invoice processing and seize early payment discounts
Strategies to take care for successful Accounts Payable Automation
A few practices you can use to set your AP department up for success are listed below:
Automating and Digitizing Payments
Payment automation is a must for any successful business. The traditional paper-based processes have left many companies vulnerable for years. Payment automation allows the AP departments to issue payments remotely and more efficiently, offering them real-time tracking and 24/7 access to payment information.
Good payment automation helps in increasing productivity within the department, allowing one to save time and resources. Furthermore, it also will enable businesses to eliminate almost all of their accounts payable check printing, thereby enabling remote business continuity check printing.
Fully Automate Invoice Processing
Invoice automation gave the AP departments the power to automatically move paper invoices, e-Invoices, and emailed invoices. They are changed into a digital workflow with three or four-level recognition and auto-fraud detection. The Invoice automation helps the remote approval processes, multi-factored approval workflows, email notifications to the approvers when an invoice is received, flags for missing or updated information, custom character and field scanning, etc. Moreover, a fully automated invoice solution helps to eliminate the risk of fraud, virtually giving the AP department complete control of the invoice approval process.
Enable No Touch and Remote AP
Finance and AP departments have historically held onto manual-based processes far longer than other areas of business. The primary reason for the delay in adopting newer and more streamlined processes has always been the comfort of trusted payment methods and perceived difficulty in acquiring and maintaining vendor payment information. Keeping track of banking and credit card information certainly seems more difficult than writing a paper check, where all you need is a name and an address.
Decentralize and Layer AP Functionality
That means AP and finance professionals need to implement solutions that allow full functionality from the office or the house. Decentralization is critical for all aspects of business operations in our new normal. If you can’t make it into the office to receive paper invoices and print paper checks, you’ll need a full-proof backup plan.
Advantages of using AP Automation
Accounts Payable Software is the primary reason for businesses to work efficiently and smartly. A few of the benefits are listed below:
Save Time
When using AP automation software, you save a lot of time processing invoices and payments than it takes if you manually work.
Immediate Cost Reduction
When using AP Automation, it effectively reduces your expenditures by eliminating wasted time on manual invoice processing and cut back on orders of check printing supplies, MICR toner, check stock, envelopes, and postages too.
Revenue Generation
You also create a new revenue stream by moving to electronic payments and invoicing.
Increased Control and Confidence
Lastly, by automating your invoice and payment processes, you also gain increased control over the process and confidence, knowing that the system works perfectly for you.
Safe and Secure
Any data of the payable automation solution gets stored in the cloud; therefore, your data are safe and secured.
