Techno...logic?

If you haven’t taken the time to listen to Daft Punk’s tasty techno tunes, then you’re missing out.  Or at least your crossfit or running training sessions are missing out.  There’s just something amped about how those French dudes roll in terms of creating musical fusion...you could say they’re on it.  In hilarious fashion a lot of their thematics in both their lyrics, style, and even videography blends a hybrid of both human and technology.  Ironically, it’s a decent segue for what we’re looking at today, or at least it is in my opinion, and maybe it’s inspired us to write this little ditty for you today.

Optimization is a big deal

This is true in virtually any area of life...I mean who doesn’t want to get the best out of something.  We’re always searching for optimal value whether when we shop or spend and certainly when we’re tweaking, changing, and overhauling processes.  Few areas are as ripe for optimization in the light of the current state of available technologies as is the Accounts Payable function.  Now, we’ve written tomes on the nature of manual AP vs automated AP and we are unabashed advocates of the latter.  In the case you’re one of the poor souls mired in an automation-less existence then you have our deepest condolences...everything is on you and a burden, and that just isn’t fun.

Now once you’ve deployed some form of automation, whether front end invoice processing, e-invoicing, or EDI, then you’re in the market for process optimization.  For the sake of the remaining paragraphs, our purview is oriented around front end invoice processing and payment optimization as we believe those are the easiest approaches to deploy requiring your vendors little to no change and thus has the highest chances for short and long term success and adoption.

Optimization Impacts

Divide and conquer.

Instead of trying to boil the ocean in terms of automating every invoice that comes into your organization from day one, the better approach is to divide and conquer.  As an example, looking at your Accounts Payable software roll out as a departmental onboarding procedure, or using geography as the basis, or a subset of “clean” vendors makes the execution better and will help you get better results.  In other words, you have to know your process and its weaknesses and strengths and then move in the area of strengths to streamline the segments that are going to get you the best bang for your efforts.  This can mean taking the biggest swath of invoices that have clean matching data and starting there.  From there you reassess and then move to the areas that require additional triage or care advance and lock those down and so on.

Use an Escalator not a Wonkavator.

Yes, if you remember from Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, Willy Wonka had a special elevator that could go upwards, downwards, forwards, sideways, longways, allways...it could even fly.  That may work well in the realm of children’s sci-fi, but in the Orwellian hellscape that is manual Accounts Payable, an Escalator is much better.  What I mean by that is leveraging workflow and business intelligence technology to isolate outliers.  In the event you have invoices that for whatever reason are not advancing through the process, but need to, then you can use rules within your Accounts Payable software to act on your behalf and escalate them to whatever personnel can effect a positive outcome.

Optimize payments

Whether it means capturing an early payment discount, or paying timely to avoid late payment fees, optimizing payments is an area that Accounts Payable software can make tangible contributions to your process that can be realized with monetary impact.  Again, through advanced business intelligence embedded within your automation software you can eliminate the headache of having to physically manage each and every payment transaction and instead create a pathway by which you can achieve high levels of payment optimization as a default.  This means you can also drive strategic ePayments if you're trying to monetize your payment stream and get both tighter controls and a kickback for your spend auto-magically!