Here’s a ‘ponderable prompt’: How much time, in total, does your organization spend dealing with invoices and payment requests each month? You probably won’t be able to give a concrete answer to that question, and for good reason: most simply don’t have the resources to put time and effort into critical self-evaluation deep dives! Lacking the ability to just have more hours in the day, the simplest way to get a handle on your AP processes is to convert to a paperless & automated AP system.
MANAGING YOUR TRANSITION TO AUTOMATIC
When considering where to start on a revamp of your AP system, we find the place to look first are the areas in which you stand to gain the most by automating. To help you with that task, here are the 6 areas in which we find automation to be most helpful:
- EASIER AND FASTER APPROVALS
- Accounts Payable processes must involve approvals as a matter of course. We find that any process which depends fully on human interaction will benefit the most from being automated. The typical journey for an invoice has it going back-and-forth between approvers, sometimes several times. Migrating approvals into automated workflows is an easy way to find more time in the day!
- REDUCTION IN TURNAROUND TIME
- The difference an automated AP system makes in terms of invoice payment turnaround times can be mission-critical for your projects! With approvals and RFPs flying from inbox to inbox, payments can easily sit in the queue for 12-15 days before being processed. Automated AP systems are easily capable of reducing the average turnaround time from 2 weeks to as low as 1-3 days.
- FORGET ABOUT THE “EASY MISTAKES”
- Late payments, fees and missed opportunities can add up to a great deal in very little time. Even the most strident of compliance policies will only manage to reduce error rates to an average of 5-10% on simple tasks. Automating those same processes will immediately reduce the error rate to a minimum while also allowing your team to re-allocate efforts to more mission-critical tasks.
- REDUCE MENTAL WORKLOAD OF PROCESSES
- It should go without saying, but an automated process is much easier to manage than a manual process! Once your team is fully trained on the new system, the total time and effort required to keep your AP processes running will be much lower, leading to a more stress-free environment and a happier workforce.
- GAIN A CLEAR VIEW OF YOUR OUTGOING MONIES
- When your AP processes are still mostly manual and depend on communication between many different actors, it is very difficult to get a good handle on the big picture and very easy to have things fall through the cracks. Integrating all of your payments into a centralized system makes it easy to follow the money.
- ELIMINATE ERRONEOUS PAYMENTS
- Have you ever realized that you’ve been paying for a service or tool that no has been going unused for months? It’s a more common occurrence than you might think! Moving your AP into a single system makes it easy to isolate WHY payments are happening (or NOT happening!) and take action!
THE NEXT STEP IS UP TO YOU!
Simply put, the total number of ways that automation can make business life easier is limited only by the human imagination. The best starting point will always be YOUR biggest frustration.
For Over 63 Years – American Micro Company | Dedicated to helping organizations gain independence through transition from improperly stored documents to automated data management and workflow solutions.
