Monday 20 June 2016

Accounts Payable Software: How to Achieve High AP Performance

The AP function plays a key role within an organization’s financial operation. The process can impact accounts payable software working capital, the efficiency and cost of the procure-to-pay process, and relationships with strategic vendors. Manual process decreases AP performance, resulting in high processing costs, missed early payment discounts, late payment fees and so forth. In order to transform AP team from the manual processing to an automated high-performance one, organizations require various steps that address process, labor and technology requirements. Here we explain how organizations can achieve AP transformation.







In the very first step of the transformation process, organizations should centralize the receipt of invoices and convert them into ERP formatted data. This immediately impacts cycle time, supplier inquires, invoice processing cost and time. It creates a basis for process automation and labor optimization downstream. Once the invoice intake is strongly laid down, they should focus on minimizing labor cost in processing- approval, reporting, vendor inquires, discrepancy resolution, compliance and so forth. It can be minimized by moving some of the matching, discrepancy and vendor workload in-advance so that invoices can be validated and accepted/rejected before entering the workflow, thus reducing workload.



Discrepancy resolution and approval workflow should be automated. Invoices should be processed from receipt-release-payment without human intervention. Organizations need to implement a robust system that works for all invoices- PO, non PO, travel and expense, across all ERPs. The invoice processing system should easily integrate with various applications it needs to interface. It should offer line item matching, easy-to-customize workflow, spend analytics, vendor portals, and mobile approval capabilities. A best-in-class accounts payable software solution provides all these capabilities that can dramatically transform your AP process.