Eliminating the accounts payable pain points with automation
Most organizations have been working with paper-based processes when dealing with suppliers, but this approach comes with frictions. Accounts payable departments should wait for bills and invoices to go onto their table, and staff have to enter details before processing payments. The pandemic has made employees work from home and made it more challenging for the accounts payable team to collect invoices.
Manual invoice processing obstructs smooth transactions and could present challenges to business growth. Businesses following traditional processes will increase manual errors or duplicate invoices, which would result in additional expenses and delays.
Therefore, businesses are looking to automate invoice management while maintaining a greater degree of accuracy. Automated accounts payable software ensures that vendors receive their funds on the agreed-upon dates, which would improve vendor relationships.
This article explains how businesses can leverage digital transformation to improve invoice processing and keep AP operations run smoothly and promptly.
Time constraints
Businesses receiving invoice documents struggle to track these documents. AP department has to review data for accuracy and relevancy, especially when dealing with hundreds of invoice documents. Employees have to spend a significant amount of time, which is a concern for businesses anticipating staffing reductions. Managing AP workloads with smaller teams turned out to be the primary objective for business representatives.
Organizations are looking to adopt technologies that can extract data from invoices and feed it into the AP system. Automation could save time and help businesses eliminate errors that could result in disputes with vendors. Managing invoice processing through artificial intelligence (AI) can better detect duplicates.
Digital technologies
AP departments can employ various technologies to transform invoice processing. For example, optical character recognition (OCR) can extract the invoice data and populate it onto the invoice document. According to policies and alerts, AI can help extract invoice data through company systems when duplicate invoice instances are detected.
Robotic process automation is emerging as another transformation that takes over repetitive tasks. RPA tools instruct bots to carry out the AP operations the same way as the staff does but rapidly. RPA bots can also help duplicate invoice checks and prevent fraud or other issues. This technology can save a company’s time by completing five-minute processes, which would otherwise take hours when managed manually.
AP departments are aware that legacy invoice processing are not on par with modern realities or responds quickly to changes in the business landscape. Advanced technologies can automate invoice management and make the process error-free while allowing staff to emphasize complicated tasks that could ultimately fuel business growth.
