Few Tasks to Automate in Accounts Payable

Today, accounts payable department in many organizations still enter invoice data manually. Employees have to spend a lot of time on printing paper checks, filling up paper documents, stuffing envelopes, and more.

Performing AP tasks manually is not only time consuming but also costs a lot of money leaving your accounts payable process prone to errors. So, automating accounts payable tasks such as matching invoices and approvals, entering data, vendor relationships, and payment execution can aid you to prevent a few common AP problems.

Data Entry

By typing data manually, it is likely that you are going to end up with multiple errors. These errors can leave a deep impact on your business. Moving a decimal point in the wrong place or adding extra zero can make your organization to lose thousands of dollars. At the same time, if your employees take a lot of time to check every entry manually, there is no guarantee that they can catch every error.

Automated accounts payable software takes information directly either by capturing information from electronic invoices or they use the data capture technology to turn paper information into digital files. Such systems automatically check for any kind of irregularities, prevent errors, and have high accuracy.

Vendor Relationships

It is very common to lose time in accounts payable by following up with vendors multiple times or answering their questions. If any information is missing or the vendor wants to check their invoice status, then it can take multiple days to go through all the paperwork needed.

An accounts payable system lets you set up a supplier portal which provides vendors with limited access to the software so they can submit the missing information and invoices directly. Also, vendors can check the status of their invoices instead of contacting you.

Matching Invoices and Approvals

Before paying an invoice, make sure that it is valid. This means that every invoice is approved by the department head or match them to a purchase order. But, performing the task manually can turn out to be a nightmare of email threads, misplaced paperwork, purchase order checks, and running around the workplace to follow up on the approvals.

In automated AP software, mostly the invoices are matched to the purchase orders without the need for human intervention. Only in some cases, invoices need manual processing. At the time of approving invoices, the accounts payable software sends them directly to the approver along with automatic follow-up reminders, if the approver fails to approve the invoice within a certain period of time.

An organization is bound to succeed in the market and reap benefits if it can replace the manual AP process with more effective accounts payable software.