Automation to Simplify Accounts Payable Processes

Automation is the top priority for accounting and CFO professionals. Automation, when done in accounts payable departments, will help in processing invoices faster, with better control and reduced costs.

Many enterprises miss the benefits of automation as they choose the wrong technology or take the wrong approach to deploy the technology. The terms procurement automation, payments automation, and AP automation are challenging to differentiate.

What to automate in accounting payable workflows? Have a clear vision of automating your payment processes. See what the best solution would look like.

For instance, you need to automate your payments and need to have an end-to-end solution that will help you achieve business goals and gain efficiency.

So, what your business needs?

Automating Procurement Process

Automating procurement process guides employees throughout the buying process. All vendors and products are listed in a centralized location, so it becomes easy to compare prices and promotional discounts.

Automation provides insights into spending and prevents rogue purchases. Procurement software works better for large and decentralized companies.

Payments Automation

While procurement automation streamlines the buying process, payments automation simplifies the signing processes. Procurement software enables organizations to make payments easily while streamlining the invoice processing and approval processes.

In most cases, payments automation is integrated with P2P or AP automation. Also, most solutions do not integrate with other solutions, which require users to enter the data and upload in their ERP manually.

AP Automation

Invoice processing involves many steps; businesses look for solutions that offer a complete end-to-end platform that can seamlessly integrate with most ERPs. This kind of solution provides a sophisticated platform that requires a one-time login.

When you have a unified AP platform that manages procure-to-pay process end-to-end, this is how the workflow looks like:

The solution reads invoices with OCR technology and decides which workflow they need to follow for approvals. Once the invoices are approved, they get synced with the accounting system. The system then makes payment and exports the data into the ERP.

All this can be done from a single interface, and all the data will be stored in a centralized repository.

Before making the purchase, consider features and benefits from a service provider and understand to what extent you can automate the workflow. Ask questions to the provider to know how best the solution suits your business.