Do you need to Manage your cash Better? Go for Accounts Payable (AP) Process Automation

What is Accounts Payable Automation?

Accounts-payable-automation helps you to minimize human intervention and mistake-prone tasks from the accounts payable process. This is achieved by using accounts-payable-automation-solutions integrated with an online network and connecting business partners digitally.

What are the Challenges to an optimized and error-free Accounts Payable?

AP processes are still largely manual and paper-intensive. When the volume of invoices increase, manual procedures start to show their limitations and challenges more.

Approvals

While some firms have automated certain portions of the A/P process by receiving electronic invoices via electronic data interchange (EDI), many manual validations and approval processes remain

Paper Invoices

Companies struggle with the challenges of receiving paper invoices and matching them against purchase orders (POs) and general ledger (GL).

Manual Transfer

Transferring data manually from various Invoice formats into standard company format is a slow, inefficient and error-prone process.

Want to learn more about Accounts Payable (AP) Process Automation?

Speak to one of our experts today.

How do you Automate-an-AP-Process ?

You can automate accounts payable by following the four below mentioned steps.

Digitizing Paper Invoices and Interpreting Data

AP automation is all about automating the invoice processing and to automate-accounts-payable , first, you need to get business-ready information from paper invoices. You can use Electronic capture technology along with a document scanner to scan paper invoices and make electronic images of invoices.

Optical character recognition (OCR) technology that recognizes printed characters from scanned documents/ images or photographs can help you retrieve data from the paper invoices and index the documents, almost eliminating the need for manual data entry.

Recognized characters are converted into machine-encoded text that can later be edited or saved in files of any desirable format. An intelligent document capture system can take the OCR to a much higher level with the help of Computer Vision, AI etc. and can differentiate between an invoice number and a PO number and validate the invoice details against the purchase order from the ERP system.

Now you can link the Purchase Order Number to an accounting database and find out the name of the supplier and automatically pair the invoices and purchase orders and can be sure that the supplier isn’t charging more.

Processing and Managing

Once data is recognized, you need to go for automated methods for processing the invoices that can process both non-PO and PO invoices, GL code and ensure all data on the purchase orders and invoices align through two-way matching, and three-way matching.

Now you also need automated methods to route the invoices for validation and approval, and to enter the data in the back-end A/P system, along with an image of the original invoice.

Business process management and AP-automation-workflow technology can automate manual tasks and can improve visibility into individual work items and the overall performance of the AP operation.

Once invoices are put into this systematic workflow, the finance and accounts department can track the invoices to see the sender, the totals, due date, details of modifications and approvals and the total liabilities.

Storing

An enterprise content management (ECM) software can help you organize, manage and securely store any type of document from any source, and then make these documents accessible once needed and via enterprise applications or through a simple web browser. A simple search can retrieve the invoices easily.

All invoices and image data can be stored online and can be password protected for security. All modifications can also be captured in the content management system. You can now track each invoice in the workflow, and ensure timely payment of each invoice.

Accounts-payable-process-automation makes the entire AP cycle visible with all documents, records, approvals, transactions, and payments indexed and stored for easy access. Auditing also becomes easy with all such details.

Integrating with ERP

Accounts-payable-automation is valuable, however true economies of scale can be realized once integrated with the enterprise business systems that drive the accounting function.

You must extract the relevant data from your AP process and connect it with your chosen enterprise applications to achieve faster invoice processing and gain better control of your company’s spending.

What are the Benefits of AP-Automation-Software ?

An innovative and versatile accounts-payable-automation-solution offers many benefits and some important ones are mentioned as under

The Takeaway

You need to keep in mind your business objectives before choosing the best accounts-payable-software . Ensure that the software is useful and can simplify your bookkeeping processes. The software needs to be user friendly and affordable and must have features that are integral to your business. Selecting the right software can make your business productive and profitable.

A Member Firm of Andersen Global

Need Assistance?

Get In Touch

We appreciate your interest in IMC and are eager to address your needs.

To ensure we address your needs accurately and promptly, please fill out this form. This will help us in identifying and connecting you with the appropriate team of experts in our organization.

We take pride in our responsiveness and aim to get back to you within a span of 1-2 business days. Your journey towards solutions starts here.

Companies we have worked with