Why AP Automation ?
This is one of the common questions that we come across if a company should invest in automating their Accounts Payable process. Well, the answer is, many companies out there do this!
Let’s face the fact that many companies do face a lot of challenges handling this part of the business and list out a few significant problems
- Poor data entry – With many departments involved during the procurement of materials, the data is provided through unstructured data like emails, documents, OCR, RPA, etc. How to keep track of all these without any human error intervention?
- Approval process – With different levels of approval needed during procurement, people often have to wait for a timely response to process the requests. This is a significant roadblock of mid-sized companies stretching their wings wide.
- Storage – When most of the organizations running on “Cloud” these days and organizations with non-digitized systems, storing the documents and retrieving them is a challenge.
- Handling Fraudulent Remittance– Even with all restrictions and compliances in place, there are organizations that still face issues with paying the suppliers before the receipt of materials on double payments. In the healthcare domain, there are organizations working with receiving paper invoices due to HIPAA compliance where they can step into different digitized methods of addressing this issue.
- Time & Cost – Looking at the above significant challenges the primary concern for any organization would be on time and cost. How much time is spent to address these issues and investment does an organization have to continue with their current business model?
This is where Automating your Accounts Payable with different online tools, and available integration platforms help to ease running a business
- Start planning and research on what are the online tools that are available which can help you address the issues that as an organization that you are facing. Taking advantage of having specific applications to manage and utilize efficiently is the first step to resolve your problems.
- Having an xRM (This is
an extension of CRM like Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics 365, which are very
configurable and metadata driven setup) in the house would help a business to
segment many parts of the company. An xRM solution to a business not only
manages Customers but also track everyone doing business with you. Building a
customized CRM or having a platform which addresses these would help
organizations to have data entry at one point and maintain all their records at
one single system
I do understand just having an xRM / CRM wouldn’t resolve how you can automate AP, but that’s a start for any organization who is looking to roll-on for the first time. - Organizations would sure have an ERP or an Accounting tool to manage their financial data. Taking off some load on what accounting does is an excellent step to get things on track in saving a lot of time and cost.
- They are using online applications to tackle warehouse, shipping and packaging, a delivery confirmation. Etc is part of any organizations now that are looking to streamline their business. Using specific applications to manage different segments of the system will ease the business and help to track the progress easily within an organization.
- For Healthcare sectors, adhering to multiple compliances would be a challenge and using different digitized way to transfer data outside of the organization can be done over emails, secure FTPs, secure ways to payout can be addressed.
Well, talking all of above on how can one automate AP and multiple business segments. That’s why an organization would need a solution provider to help you integrate and have all these data manage across different platforms. Automating AP would ease business in generating vendor bill’s, maintaining the item receipts, tracking shipments, managing inventory, automating payments, etc. without much human intervention and human error.
Auto scheduling of payments, send out reminders, getting the best of the systems to manage approvals are at ease automating your largest business sector. All these can be done when you look out for different applications that are handling these exclusive tasks for you.
These would ensure your accounting is not involved in every step of the process. As the data can be shared across multiple systems, accounting would never be a bottleneck for any of your queries. And to make sure this happens, integrating your data with the platform can ensure you are in the right direction.
There are many surveys conducted helping us to understand that close to 35% to 40% of time and cost is reduced having AP automation.
With Data accessibility you can generate all kinds of reports and dashboards to be on top of your business and making use of different BI tools to understand how things are working out for you at different segments.
Integration tools out in the market help you connect different applications and all data available across the multiple systems. One can question why should someone choose so many applications and have an integration setup between them. Well, my answer to them will be “ how easy is it to live in a four-wall room when you are piling up.”
Integration platforms can make sure you don’t go through the hassle of maintaining data with multiple entries in different applications. There can be real-time integration to make data more available across the organization.
You can get many integration platforms but DBSync being in the elite club of iPaaS space proving integration solutions connecting a variety of on-premise or cloud applications is subscribed and recommended for automating Accounts Payable. With many templates explicitly built to integrate different applications that I have mentioned above, they can offer a solution to the problem of an organization. Having a platform which can be leveraged to solve multiple issues of an organization can be fulfilled through integration, and I firmly believe these folks can do it.
