Can AP Automation Protect Your Business?

The remote working trend is a massive structural shift in how businesses function. Threats and cyber-attacks constantly keeps your managers up all night. And the digital transformation of companies remains in full swing. So, what can be done to thrive?

Since 2020, unprecedented number of workers are working from home most of the time. Around 96% of companies are allowing flexibility in when and where the staff can work even when they return to office. 89% of staff chose to work in a hybrid model.

And almost 2/3 of enterprises have embraced this trend and started work-from-anyplace models. What does this indicate? How is your business processing invoices and paying the bills? Performing these activities fast, securely, and appropriately at any time is now a ‘must have’.

Accounts payable automation software enable organizations to eradicate paperwork and continue paying their bills on time no matter whether employees are at workplace or working from home. When the Covid-19 pandemic started, cybercriminals took advantages of the work from home environment in order to hack into your desktops and smartphones.

The home networks aren’t much secured as the networks used in the offices. Some small companies stated that cyber threats have increased in these last two years.

It has been observed that 35% of companies were hit by ransomware in 2021. Many criminals have shifted from large scale, automated attacks to a more targeted attack, which includes human operations. Although the overall number of attacks is less, there is still potential damage from the targeted attacks.

This pandemic has also sparked an increase in payment fraud. Plus, business email compromises still remain the major source for attempted and actual payment fraud. In this case, a fraudster sends an email to your staff pretending to be an employee at your organization. These emails instruct the staff to approve payment/release customer information. Often, your workers fall into their trap.

Key Features of Automated AP That Will Protect Your Company from Cyberattacks

Fortunately, for the finance team, cloud-based accounts payable solutions increase security and protect the company from attacks with different features.

a. Recognize Access Management

Automation makes sure that the correct individuals have the access to the resources and at the right time. So, to ensure this occurs, modern technology provides separation of duties advantages that allocate various internal workers to perform several financial activities.

By leveraging this system, a single person cannot perform all the duties. This will make it difficult for anyone to steal from your business without other people noticing.

b. Centralized Procedures

Accounts payable software solution centralizes processes in secure electronic formats. Accounting and AP details become merged into a single dashboard, offering transparency, and making it simple to detect and avoid fraud.

c. Tracking Security

At the time of automation, you can gain 24/7 on call rotation of security functions workers dedicated to protecting the data. The solution is capable of:

• Spotting critical missing invoice information
• Monitoring late hours logins.
• Monitoring unforeseen rises in the invoice volumes

d. Use of Artificial Intelligence

AI can be leveraged for fraud prevention, intrusion, and malware detection, scoring risk in the network, along with machine/user behavioral analysis.

e. Offers Data Security

AP automations aid in protecting various data types and details like client names, invoice amounts, and payment dates. So, you do not need to worry about the unprotected paper checks floating on your desk and storing sensitive details in the filing cabinet.

AP Automation Excels at Reliability

A critical objective in protecting the business is to avoid interruptions so you can operate and effective and reliable business. AP automation’s greatest ability is reliability. This translates to quicker visibility and operational flexibility.

Automated AP systems help resolve issues that hinder manual procedures. The knowledge obstacles take place when only a single person in the AP team has massive amount of expertise in managing the invoices/payments, but later goes on a vacation or gets sick.

The rest of the employees need to speed up their work. They get help from the AP software that house the historical details in a centralized location, where they can check the relevant interaction about payments and invoices.

Custom Workflows in AP Automation

Automated accounts payable procedures also protect your organization form insecure and ineffective methods. The automated workflows can be set up by the approver level and the dollars. Like this, smaller invoices are not sent to the finance professionals unnecessarily.

You can automatically route the invoices to your approvers under some conditions. For instance, when an invoice exceeds 15,000 dollars, admins can add a step to the processes, which routes invoices automatically to the CFO for approval. When the CFO is unable to approve, someone within the senior management or group can approve as well.

AP solutions enable you to approve the invoices from anywhere. What does it indicate?

Streamlining crucial functions of paying business bills is a solution for today that will equip your organization for uninterrupted growth for tomorrow.

Protecting your company in the modern market situations has become critical. With so many changes in the workplace structures, and needs to ensure security, digitization becoming widespread, now it is the right time to ensure that your business is secure from such interruptions.

So, it is a great opportunity to take back the control over your operations and the way your company serves clients and have less protection concerns in this significantly changing business environment.