The challenge
Accounts payable (AP) is an extremely time-consuming, laborious and paper-intensive finance and administrative function.
The AP processes are responsible for accurately tracking what is owed to suppliers and ensuring payments are properly approved, preventing mistakes and fraud. They are key to good relationships with suppliers by making sure that they are paid on time.
AP brings together the procurement function with the accounts payable department, takes place across different parts of the organisation and involves multiple people. Especially in the case of milestone invoicing, where the total amount is invoiced across a variety of billing periods when pre-defined goals are attained, making sure that every milestone is properly accomplished might be challenging.
This introduces complexity and, at times, confusion, especially when the process is manual and the interactions between procurement and AP department are paper- or email-based.
Digitalizing and automating the AP processes helps ensure greater accuracy and faster invoice processing, while offering business insights with which to optimize payment timing and terms with suppliers.
The solution
The AP process is one of the best places for any business to start automating, as spend is a powerful source of potential savings and value for the entire organization.
Automated AP processes embed payment controls as simple and repeatable processes and keep a log of all approvals in a central location for easy auditing. Thanks to the automation, the invoice is routed for approval according to the rules and workflow built in the system.
Automated tasks can be assigned to the supplier, to the procurement function and to the accounts payable department to ensure that each invoice is reviewed and approved in a secure and timely manner.
Automating the entire AP process minimizes the time spent on data entry, eliminates the need to reprocess invoices, and simplifies exceptions for invoicing errors. This, in turn, will streamline and standardize invoice payments and improve your supplier relationships. Also, businesses have a real-time picture of payables from a project-based perspective.
NotifyMe AP software solution allows users to digitalize and automate the AP process increasing efficiency and minimising potential errors.
Our AP Management workflows are developed on the ColFlow TM Collaborative Workflow Engine and can be customized with the support of our Business Process Optimization team.
