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Do You Want to Know What Are The Benefits of Automating Your Payables Process?
Paying bills can be a hassle. This is especially true when you are running a business with many expenses coming from many different providers, suppliers, and vendors. The more invoices you have to keep track of, the harder it gets to stay on top of things.
Processing all of these invoices in a manual, paper-based AP department makes it pretty easy for one or two to fall through the cracks. And while this might just seem like an annoyance at times, staying on top of these bills can mean the difference between success and lights out.
Automating your accounts payable process can make all the difference. There are many benefits to automation, but these are among the most exciting:
Saving You Money
By switching to automated payments, you can save money by qualifying for early pay discounts and avoiding late fees that are common with manual payments. Automation also cuts back on overhead costs and the processing cost-per-invoice. Often, automation cuts what you spend to process each invoice by more than half.
Saving You Time
Automation also saves you time. Once the process has been automated, it will continue to run on its own while steadily reducing employee involvement. You can get to the point where 80-90% of all invoices are processed without human involvement. This leaves employees with the time they need to handle exceptions invoices and perform other important tasks for the company that need a human touch.
Decreasing Paper Use
By automating your payments and using electronic submission methods, you can reduce the paper used. Not only does this lessen your carbon footprint, but it also sets you up for easier processing and quicker response times. Paperless processing also makes record storage easier. Digital files take up much less storage space. They’re also easy to search through and find just what you’re looking for.
Improving Record Keeping
Automated bill pay is especially efficient because it organizes your information and leaves a trail after each payment. This trail makes your job even easier because payments are clearly documented and tracked automatically. This makes proof of payment as simple as pointing to your digital trail. Some automation solutions can also provide vendors and auditors with direct access to the payment details or invoice history, further easing your workload.
Tightening Data Security
Keeping information secure is one of the biggest challenges facing businesses in the 21st Century. The accounts payable department is a prime target for fraud. In a manual, paper-based system anyone who walks into the office can see invoices sitting around. Plus, it’s hard to keep track of paper invoices well enough to catch duplicate and near-duplicate invoices. Automation gives you the tools you need to improve security and fight fraud.
Allowing Collaboration
The best AP automation systems (like NextProcess) don’t charge extra for additional user licenses. That gives you an easy, inexpensive way to let multiple people collaborate on invoice processing. You can even set up a supplier self-service portal. That lets your vendors and suppliers can check the status of their invoices, submit missing information, and resolve disputes within the automation system. And since the system updates in real-time, no one has to worry about doing the same task twice.
Providing Organization and Control
Automation helps you get control over your entire accounts payable process. The money-saving benefits improve cash flow within your company. Faster processing frees-up employees for other tasks and helps keep your suppliers and vendors happy. Digital record keeping makes it easy to access the information needed for tasks like audits and budgeting. In short, once you improve your accounts payable workflow it will give you better organization and control over everything related to the AP department.
These are only a few of the benefits to automated payables processes. And the good news is that you can start seeing these benefits in your own company from the first day you start using accounts payable automation.
Here at NextProcess, we combine automation technology and experienced personnel to achieve a solution that significantly improves your payables process. Our accounts payable software is highly customizable to offer a variety of solutions. We’ll work with you personally to customize our best service offerings to your specific needs and to integrate our system with your existing ERPs.
Click here to learn more about our automation services and get on track to a better, more reliable accounts payable system!