How AP Automation Improves Control Over Your Business Finances

As a finance leader, payment control is top on your mind. It is easy to understand when you are concerned about losing control and taking up more risk by leveraging cloud-based accounts payable solutions and automation.

Here we present the key ways on how AP automation will give you control over the payment method.

1. Granular Insight and Control

You will gain insight into the invoice and payment procedures and organized details than you could by utilizing in the manual methods. Traditional processes are jumbled heaps of paperwork inside the workplace.

Automating accounts payable helps to monitor the steps in the payment and invoice methods. Do you want to validate the amount of payment and the time it was sent? You can do it from your workplace, home, or any other place. Plus, you can get frequent alerts and notifications of the completed actions automatically. There will be constant audits of these methods checks to ensure that the process works properly.

2. Proper Management of Exceptions

Exceptions arrive from time to time while processing invoices and payments. Such unusual payment situations like numerical inconsistencies, which require special attention to details, cannot be managed routinely.

The online accounts payable system excels in recognizing such exceptions, thereby saving productive hours and money. You can control the number of exceptions you need to manage and the speed needed to process them by using automation.

3. Fewer Number of Errors

Automating the AP methods makes fewer mistakes as more people can review the invoice and payment data. Catching errors will take place quickly. The AP team will not make inappropriate/duplicate payments and other costly errors prevailing paper checks.

But how? The employees can check on their laptops the payment data and invoice at the same time. They will spend more time evaluating the accuracy of the details, fixing mistakes, and identifying abnormalities in data and documents, which lead to erroneous payments.

Searching for the mistakes and correcting them is time-consuming. Also, when you depend on traditional fact-checking, you can never be sure that you identified them all. In a manual process, mistakes inevitably show up in Excel sheets, invoices are misplaced for some time and later paid late, and duplicate payments slip through.

This issue travels deeper. It would be good if you keep in mind that the number of mistakes using traditional methods is worse than the available statistics as it includes the identified errors. For more time, many go unnoticed as well. Some are never found. Others are ignored because of the hard work and time needed to fix it.

Contrarily, AP solution needs minimal human intervention and minimizes errors as they are much simpler to identify than leveraging manual processes.

4. Internal Controls

We have focused on multiple aspects of gaining more control of the AP methods using a bill payment system. There are definite categories of internal controls that enhance security and decrease data and financial losses of the AP transactions and data.

Validating the payment obligation ensures that there is a method and proves the payment requirements to be made. Later the data must be entered into the automated solution. Then the payment is sent to the suppliers.

At every stage, balances and checks control the procedure. The entire purpose is to ensure that tight controls are set to determine who has asked to be paid and the amount. For instance, a PO should match the invoice amount with the same account number. This payment needs to be approved. Such controls make sure that the right person gets paid the right amount without duplicate payments. The AP automation software executes the steps quickly and appropriately than the manual solutions.

Internal controls starting from reconciliation, security, and authority documentation also exist to meet financial reporting deadlines and boost data accuracy. The auditors can be called to fix improper record-keeping and other factors of your organization’s finances that risk the company.

To Sum Up

Wanting complete control of the finances is very natural. You have the right to remain concerned about the large payments going to the right people on time for the right amount. It can be done using traditional methods. However it won’t be quick and appropriate as accounts payable automation. When you need more control, the AP system can aid you to amend the game.