Many companies turn to their CPAs and accounting firms for advice on taxes and risk avoidance. But thanks to advancements in technology, CPAs are also playing a larger role in their clients’ businesses when it comes to efficiency and profitability. One area that CPAs are particularly keen on improving is the accounts payable department.
Your AP team is responsible for getting your vendors paid on time for any goods and services purchased throughout your company. Even for small-to-medium sized businesses, this can mean managing hundreds, if not thousands of invoices each month. Typically, the department faces numerous manual steps when handling invoices including:
- Receiving invoices: unfortunately, each invoice is different so it can take time just to analyze and categorize each invoice.
- Reviewing invoices: what information is included and how should the invoice be processed?
- Entering data: keying in data from the invoice into your accounting or management system is a manual step.
- Seeking new information and approval: often invoices require supporting information or approvals based on corporate guidance and the AP team spends time hunting down both.
- Paying the invoice: once the invoice is approved, more manual work is done by finding the correct information inside the accounting system and approving the invoice for payment.
Fortunately, the worst parts of this process can be automated with Paperwise Symphony. In fact, studies show that AP invoice automation can reduce the cost of processing by 80% or more. It’s no wonder that CPAs and accounting firms are eager to recommend AP invoice automation to their clients to help drive new profit.
The Importance of Your Accounts Payable Team
The accounts payable department is often taken for granted in many companies; yet they play an extremely critical role. In fact, if the processes in your accounts payable team are slow or broken, they can have an enormous impact on the entire business.
- Supplier relationships suffer from overdue payments, lost invoices, and inaccurate data.
- Late and incorrect invoice processing can result in extra costs, penalties, or even delivery and service interruptions.
- Lack of tightly defined and managed AP processes can lead to cash flow management problems, fraud, or compliance failures.
Unfortunately, this important team may perform menial and repetitive tasks for your company including:
- Paperwork: sorting, categorizing, filing, and managing paperwork takes time away from more important work like supplier relations and problem solving.
- Manual data entry: data entry takes time and leads to many errors and misplaced documents.
- Hunting down approvals: larger or unusual invoices require input from others in the organization and without automation, your AP team must get that input one at a time with various communication methods.
- Providing information: AP teams spend a lot of time looking up information to help with supplier relations, cash flow, and reporting. Automation gives them much simpler visibility which in turn makes their job easier and helps them stay on top of important deadlines.
A Better Method for AP Invoice Processing
Paperwise Symphony eliminates or streamlines all these problem areas and more for your AP department. Problem areas may include:
- Receiving invoices: instead of reading each invoice as it comes in, our Intelligent Capture solution reads them for you. The system acquired data off the invoice, scan or email and categorizes each document by vendor, PO number, purchaser and more, saving your team many minutes per invoice. That data can then be used in several other automations for review, approval, and entry into your management system.
- Reviewing invoices: you can set tolerances for invoices so that most invoices with matching PO, vendor, and amount data automatically get paid while others are routed for more information and approvals.
- Entering data: thanks to Paperwise Symphony’s integrations, your AP team no longer needs to manually enter data. Our software intelligently captures your data and can be integrated to automatically update your accounting system.
- Seeking new information and approval: Paperwise Symphony can route invoices for approval for you, so you don’t lose track of paper or have to drop in an approver’s office for attention.
- Paying the invoice: when all of the information and approvals align, Paperwise Symphony can automatically signal your accounting system for payment.
AP Invoice Process Automation Offers Real Benefits
At the end of the day, CPAs are recommending AP invoice automation because of the hard and soft savings it offers to their clients. Companies save time, reduce errors, improve efficiencies, and make more of their early payment discounts thanks to automation.
The hard ROI areas of improvement where companies can directly measure financial improvement include things like:
- Reduced labor costs
- Reduced costs from fraud, incorrect payments, and other errors
- Reduced late payment penalties and increased on-time payment benefits like discounts
- Better ability to scale without the typical corresponding labor cost increase
Soft ROI benefits from implementing Paperwise Symphony include:
- Better working environments for your AP team
- Better employee relationship thanks to automated approval follow-up
- Increased supplier and employee satisfaction
- Streamlined processes across the entire organization
If you’re a CPA and would be interested in offering automation solutions to your clients, please talk to one of our experts today. You may also be interested in some of our other resources related to AP invoice automation including:
