4 Must-Have Features of AP Software for Automation

It’s imperative for enterprises to track all financial data effectively in order to enhance business productivity. But, managing financial transactions with the age-old traditional processes is obscure, slow, and is prone to errors.

Fortunately, many businesses are adopting account payable (AP) solutions to automate and streamline financials within the AP processes. With the increasing demand, the market for AP software continues to evolve over the past two decades.

Choosing the best solution among the numerous available options in the market can be a difficult task for any organization.

Below, we’ve mentioned a few features you should look for in a potential AP solution.

Integration with ERP Solutions

Every software platform is created to address specific challenges associated with streamlining business processes. Automation helps enterprises to simplify the tedious and time-consuming tasks to facilitate the scalability related to business productivity.

Traditional practices such as updating spreadsheets, uploading and downloading files, and verifying invoices with the relevant POs, creates extra work and consumes more of your staff’s time. Adding to this, multiple logins might be required to execute the necessary financial transactions, which creates fragmentation and ultimately bottlenecks of day-to-day operations.

To gain more significant benefits, many smart financial departments’ staff members prefer to invest in a solution that connects both the ERP and financial institutions, while reducing the need for manual data entry.

Fraud Protection

Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP) payments fraud and control survey conducted in 2019 states more than 82% of businesses were affected by payment fraud. The report further noted that 60% of those are SMEs. Fortunately, an automated solution with advanced functionalities and controls such as separation of duties, access control, tokenization, and dual-factor authentication mitigate the risks of fraud.

Isolation of Duties

Isolating the duties of authorizers and managers enables you to create a system of checks, thereby preventing the potential of internal payment frauds. By isolating the duties and implementing multi-level approvals, managers can mitigate the risk of invoice overlapping or payments to an unauthorized invoice.

Dual-Factor Authentication

The businesses database is comprised of confidential information, including employees’ data, vendors’ data, financial transaction details, and much more. Securing this sensitive information is paramount for any organization.

According to research conducted by Secure Swiss Data, two-thirds of users make use of similar passwords for everything and most of those passwords can be cracked in about 6 hours.

Therefore, weak passwords could lead to security breaches. However, dual-factor authentication prevents unauthorized access by adding an extra layer of security which requires the users to enter a unique security code sent via SMS or email to allow access into the system.

The Bottom Line

Automated AP systems streamline the entire end-to-end AP processes while eliminating the tedious tasks involved in the manual paper-based processes. Right from entering the financial transaction details, digitizing the records, and matching the invoices to eliminate the possibility of duplicate payments.

Advanced features such as multi-language support, multi-format support, multi-level payment approvals, and advanced analytics, improve company compliance thereby enhancing overall efficiency.