Table of Contents
No matter how you feel about accounts payable it is a vital and critical part to any business. Often businesses find themselves forgetting about accounts payable when upgrading and optimizing.
One of the most common problems faced by accounts payable is lengthy invoicing processes. This is usually caused because companies haven’t automated their invoicing process.
Automating invoicing can, in some cases, increase your workflow by around 80%. One of the benefits of this, of course, is making payments on time and spending less time chasing down approvals. However, there are several benefits to automated invoicing.
Keeping Vendors Happy
Another big benefit to automated invoicing solutions is keeping your vendors and suppliers happy. Having an efficient and fast invoice approvals system will help to avoid late fees. Not being late on paying vendors will usually make them happy.
Keeping vendors and suppliers happy is crucial if you wish to continue to work with them, or need a favor from them later. Remember to vendors and suppliers you are the customer or client. You wouldn’t want to do business with someone who is always late on their payments either.
Reducing Man-Hours
Using an automated invoicing solutions will not only reduce late payments but will also reduce man-hours. With automated invoicing system employees are free to focus on other tasks. In most cases, a business can get up to 90% of invoices processing on their own.
Another way automated invoicing assists with reducing man-hours is the speed in which it can reconcile purchase orders with supplier invoices.
While exception invoices will still need to be manually processed, there will be far fewer of those. The employees dedicated to your accounts payable are free to focus on other things instead of data entry and manual filing.
It may even be possible to find a way to cut down on the number of employees working in the accounts payable department. In these situations, companies would be able to potentially use those employees elsewhere. This can help to avoid the need to hire a new employee.
Track Cash-Flow
Automating your invoice approvals provides the ability to know in real-time where your money is going. Your accounts payable department will be able to generate unique and detailed reports. These reports will be far more accurate than those based on manual invoicing processes.
Common errors of the past, like duplicate invoices and double payments, are all but erased with invoicing automation. The system can even be customized to enforce your company’s cash flow policy.
Attempts at generating similar reports for paper copies of invoices were more often than not time-consuming, inefficient, prone to errors, and expensive. However, automated invoicing mitigates all this by providing highly accurate and detailed analytic reports in real time.
Faster Approvals
By using the automated intelligence invoicing system the rate of approvals will increase greatly. The system can be customized to follow the workflow rules of approval set up within your company.
Where this makes approvals faster is the lack of a human. The system essentially has the same parameters for approvals and denials as the human employee. Except for the system scans, analyzes, reviews, and approves the invoice at a much faster rate than a human ever could.
This is not meant to be a lead into the rise of John Henry. It is a fact though; automated systems can process information much faster than a person.
Optimizing Invoicing Process
In today’s day and age, it is unclear why so many businesses are still using paper invoices. With the advent of automated invoice processes, the process has been drastically improved.
Companies can be assured of no more late payments, real-time tracking of their cash flow, and the ability to reduce the number of errors. These errors include duplicate invoices as well as lost invoices, fraudulent invoices, and shipping orders that don’t match invoices.
Companies can typically expect to increase workflow, cut man-hours in the accounts payable department, and even approve invoices faster. There is even the chance of saving money per invoice as well. Depending upon the service provider and your current invoicing process.
Automating your invoicing solutions will give your accounts payable the adrenaline shot it may need.
