Spend Management Platform: Automate your Finances from a Unified Interface
Automation is making significant transformation in the finance department. The finance department goes beyond numbers and must be able to provide insights into the C-level executives, investors and businesses.
Managing finance processes manually hinder the ability to track key activities due to non-automated workflows alongside the risk of human errors.
These challenges intensify for growing businesses as transaction volumes increase, stretching staff and resources even thinner. Additionally, the financial department’s overhead rises as more personnel are required to handle the surge in transactions.
Automating finance processes is crucial to free up team members, allowing them to focus on more fulfilling tasks rather than routine transaction processing.
Accounts Payable
Manually managed accounts payable processes are filled with inefficiencies, such as time-consuming reconciliations, the strain of staying updated with evolving global regulations, and sluggish data processing, which hampers the ability to produce real-time insights.
There’s also the risk of harming supplier relationships by missing payment deadlines, as overburdened staff struggle to keep up with payment schedules due to the demands of manual processing.
Manually processing transactions often leads to human errors, such as transposition mistakes, where team members accidentally reverse the last two digits of a transaction. Traditional AP processes increase the cost of finance department and hinders the ability to focus on strategic decision-making as they lack of real-time financial data.
Inefficient accounts payable processes become even more problematic when they lead to significant errors and inaccuracies. Supplier details validation flagged as the most inefficient process throughout the AP journey.
It is especially concerning that inefficiencies often occur early in the AP process, as they can ripple through and disrupt transactions later on. This explains why 19% of supplier invoices are currently paid late.
Automating your accounts payable function enables finance teams to speed up processing, reduce errors, and improve access to real-time data. Top accounts payable providers offer a variety of features, including data capture, approval routing, and automated compliance management.
Around half of companies consider having their AP process fully automated. Most common AP processes that can be automated are payment execution, invoice approval and payment authorization processes.
Another aspect is that AP staff should spend some time to unpick and rectify errors. This can be more challenging for scaling businesses that deals with a growing number of invoices.
Streamlined AP processes will enable the finance department to focus on strategic activities, helping with the challenges in today’s uncertain economy.
Integrating physical and virtual corporate cards with your AP solution can significantly reduce the workload on finance teams while ensuring compliance with company spending policies. Automated accounts payable tools seamlessly reconcile and sync these card transactions with your ERP, streamlining the entire process.
Supplier Payments
Businesses must work with suppliers all over the world. Manually managing cross-border payments can be overwhelming. Paying international suppliers introduces added complexity, as finance leaders must navigate various payment methods, each with its own restrictions, transaction fees, and fluctuating exchange rates. Choosing the wrong payment type can add up costs and results in payment delays.
Leveraging an automated global payments solution for payment runs ensures that payments to international suppliers are settled in the most cost-effective way while helping you maintain tax compliance and adhere to global regulations.
Procurement
Procurement may not directly add value to a business, but it is essential to manage it effectively. Poor controls result in limited visibility into company spending, increasing the risk of non-compliance and fraudulent transactions.
Automated procurement tools enhance controls and boost efficiency by streamlining multi-layer approvals, contract management, and purchase order generation. This increased visibility into current spending and future liabilities enables CFOs to quickly adjust their business strategies in response to changing market conditions.
Friction between the finance department and other teams is alleviated by automatically generated reminder emails for pending approvals, ensuring smooth communication and collaboration.
Expense Management
Expense management is a common pain point for C-level executives. Employees tend to submit expenses lately, holding the production of monthly accounts.
Relying on spreadsheets creates a frustrating employee experience, as staff must spend considerable time completing expense reports and endure long waits for reimbursement of out-of-pocket expenses.
Switching to an automated end-to-end expense solution enhances the experience for everyone, saving time and improving the accuracy and flow of financial data.
Most spend management platforms offer mobile apps that let employees submit expenses on the go. They can simply capture receipts, upload them to the app, and have the data automatically extracted for reports. Line managers then receive automated approval prompts, ensuring employees are reimbursed quickly and efficiently.
