Being raised by parents who were nature enthusiasts, our house never had a shortage of books or magazines about the great outdoors. National Geographic, Outdoor Life, Mother Earth News — you name it, we had it lying around.
One book that I’ll always remember was the Birds of Wisconsin Field Guide. Admittedly, I never paid much attention to it growing up — I was more of a reptile kid myself — but to my parents, it was their ornithological bible. They used it as a guide to distinguish similar looking species, attract more of their feathered favorites, and even dissuade “bad birds” from making their home in our backyard.
Wouldn’t it be great if those in accounts payable (AP) management roles had a similar guide?
As different as birding and managing an AP department is, both passions could benefit from a resource helping them to avoid the bad and maximize the good.
Top 5 Pains Ailing Your Accounts Payable Team
While AP management doesn’t need to be lectured on how to run a successful department, it’s never a bad idea to stay informed on solutions that can fix pain points in a traditional AP process. With that in mind, use the field notes below to guide you in navigating your AP landscape.
First up, the top 5 pains affecting today’s AP management teams:
- Manual data entry. With the laundry list of side effects contributed to this top pain, it’s shocking that it remains so prevalent in companies. Each moment your educated AP staff has to spend manually entering data before an invoice can be approved represents lost value for your business. Avoid at all costs.
- Getting approval. Ah yes, the waiting game that no one ever seems to win. In a manual environment, supplier invoices often get routed for approval only to sit in a state of limbo on someone’s desk or email inbox, slowing the payment cycle down to a crawl. And do you know who passes their competition by crawling? Nobody.
- Erroneous invoices. Exceptions happen, but that doesn’t mean they should be accepted with no questions asked. Research by Ardent Partners revealed that 17.8% of supplier invoices cause exceptions in a “typical” company, while best-in-class companies average 9.8% exceptions — a stark contrast considering the major impact errors have on AP efficiency.
- Late payments and missed discounts. These are the worst. Not only does it have the obvious potential of damaging important supplier relationships, forming a habit of late payments makes it impossible for your team to run at peak efficiency.
- Lots of tracking and reporting. According to the Institute of Finance & Management, only 15% of AP departments currently track their metrics with technology like dashboards that display data. So then how do they do it then? Manually, which makes it harder for staffers to prioritize tasks, managers to measure team performance, and finance executives to get the cash flow visibility they need.
How AP Automation Cures All
Don’t get overwhelmed. After going through all those pains faced by AP teams, fixing them can seem daunting. Nope … not if you’ve got the proper guidance to spot a good solution when you see one. Something like the Birds of Wisconsin Field Guide, but for AP.
And you don’t even have to look far. We’ll be that guide and show you why automation is the single solution to cure your AP woes.
How can one solution put an end to so many problems? It enables businesses to streamline their entire workflow process — from the capture and extraction of invoice data to automatic dispatching for approval to customizable dashboards displaying key metrics. The benefits truly span the entire invoice settlement process and positively impact every user.
Instead of worrying about pains, you can start profiting from:
- Reduced overall costs
- Improved supplier satisfaction
- Increased payment discounts
- Enhanced reporting and analytics
- Accelerated payment cycle times
- Eliminated duplicate payments
- Strengthened credit rating
- Greater support for regulatory compliance
