Well, the ‘royal’ you as it were at least.

No, this post is not the fabled fountain of youth the Ponce de Leon so zealously sought after.  Instead, our purpose here is to reveal 5 ways a modern, agile Accounts Payable Process can help you take you from drab to dynamite!

Unfortunately, the reality for most companies contending with manual AP invoice processing, is an ugly one.  Lost documents, data entry errors, late payments, mispayments, and a host of other issues are prevalent.  This doesn’t have to be the case and so our goal is to systematically dismantle the burden of an inefficient accounts payable process and help you understand what’s possible given today’s tools and technology infrastructure, and its inherent implications to your business (and personal) well-being.

Here goes nothing…

Automated Invoice Processing means less manual touches on the invoice being processed.

Automation does the heavy lifting so staff don’t have to...period.  This translates to massive reductions in cost per invoice to process and will begin to line your corporate pockets with green instead of lint.  This is achieved through OCR, intelligent workflows, business validation and a variety of other tools.  Granted someone has to be there to design and implement these components, but that is where you should lean on the expertise of your technology partners, and set it and forget it so to speak.

Error elimination equals less redundancy.  

Have you ever heard of adding insult to injury?  Well, in the accounts payable process landscape, there is little worse than paying something incorrectly, because it has several tentacles of error correction that are required.  First, your vendor may misapply payment for which an adjustment must be made on their end.  Second, you may still receive an invoice for the invoice you thought was paid, but wasn’t, so it still remains open on their AR system.  This means, you get to go back and correct your entries after the fact and after doing due diligence and troubleshooting.  All of that takes time and takes you off task.  With automation and technology validation, you can marry up PO, receiver, and invoice data in a nice neat package and ensure the right invoice is getting paid 99.9% of the time.

Early payment discount capture.  

Another pivotal area for businesses incorporating automated invoice processing is the dramatic reduction of invoice turnaround time it creates.  In many cases, this singular effort is THE fundamental difference for being able to meet aggressive supplier timelines on which payment discounts hinge.  This is no insignificant amount either with discounts ranging from 1-3% typically.  This is free money, simply for turning payments around faster than you can in a manual environment and is sure to make any CFO or Treasurer a happy camper.

Monetization of your payment stream.

Consider it working smarter, not harder to have a more valuable process.  This is a bit of tangent to a straight up automated accounts payable process, but it is nonetheless valuable.  In fact, possibly more so than the reduction of your cost per invoice.  The point is, there is gold in them thar’ hills.  Meaning, if you partner with a credible virtual payment provider, you’re going to get rewarded with a piece of the action for all of your eligible spend, and if you take the concept beyond just a corporate card, you’re going to quickly realize that and tap a newfound, sustainable source of operational profit that is sure to delight your executive team and boost your business!

Find hidden treasure...aka time.

No, seriously, we mean it  But the treasure in this case is the wasted time you’re going to recoup, which might hold more value than the other initiatives together.  It’s a tough argument to make because one has a definitive quantitative value and the other is compared on a qualitative basis.  Bottom line is that either way you’re a winner.  In fact, the only way you lose in terms of the accounts payable process is by being idle and doing nothing.  There is no such thing as staying still, you’re either moving forward or drifting backwards, so if things have always been this way or your business is just trying to maintain the status quo, then it’s time to shake things up and get down to brass tacks and make good things happen.

If you want to see how awesome AP can be in a cloud-based, automated utopia scenario, check out this link and we’ll be happy to show you!

To learn more about best practices to improving AP, check out the eBook below.