3 Game-Changing Benefits of 100% Visibility into Processes and Spend

Financial processes can get messy if they’re paper-based and manual, leading to errors, exceptions, and a lack of visibility across processes. By leveraging automation, finance departments can gain 100% visibility, allowing them to achieve higher spend awareness, increased efficiencies, and better-managed supply chain risk.

Usually, low visibility is a direct result of a lack of process automation and therefore lack of easy access to data throughout the procure-to-pay (P2P) lifecycle. Increasing visibility can save both time and money. But the question is how can you do that?

To achieve a higher level of visibility, you need data. Good data. And that is hard to achieve with manual and paper-based processes, especially when data is stored in multiple locations. This means that it’s difficult to get a complete picture of your processes and spend without doing a lot of work to collect, analyse, and interpret the data. The first step to increasing visibility is automation.

1. Bring More Spend Under Control

With a good P2P solution, you’ll have access to all of your spend data – direct and indirect, PO and non-PO based – from one centralised location, allowing you to establish baselines and track your spending regularly.

When you have 100% spend visibility and access to an analytics functionality, you can realise more value from your P2P process by turning the data captured during transactions into insights on how money is being spent. You will not only be able to see what has happened but will also have the ability to predict when spend is expected to actualise.

Further, the more transactions you process through your automated system, the more insights you’ll accumulate over time. And with these insights, you’ll be empowered to bring more spend under management, easily forecast cashflows, build better supplier relationships, and make more strategic decisions.

2. Increase Productivity and Efficiency

When dealing with manual processes, it is very difficult to monitor processes and establish benchmarks. Automating P2P delivers easy access to process data, which can increase efficiencies, maximise productivity, and ultimately drive cost savings. When you have complete visibility over your processes, you can measure KPIs and metrics like:

• What is your electronic invoicing rate

• How long it takes to process an invoice

• How many invoices are automatically matched

• Which invoices are at risk of being paid late

• How many exceptions you're handling this month

Coupled with advanced analytics and easy to read dashboards, you can easily view process metrics and benchmarks, identify root causes for bottlenecks and minimise them.

3. Better Manage Risk in the Supply Chain

If your supply chain is poorly managed, you open the door to financial, business, and reputational risks. Through full visibility into your supply chain, you can keep these risks in check and promote a healthy business amidst modern business complexities. With the data harnessed through process automation, you can reduce risk in your supply chain and better monitor suppliers.

Manual supply chain reporting creates gaps in your data making it difficult to get the full picture of your supply chain operations. Without easy, concise action into this information, it’s hard to know exactly what sort of spend has already happened, and what sort of spend will happen in the future. Forecasting and planning for the future is nearly impossible and it’s difficult to gain control and get more spend under management. Basware Analytics offers customers an intelligent and singular platform to consolidate data and better predict trends and manage supply chains. Predictive analytics gives users visibility into which invoices are at risk of being paid late. This helps organisations foster better supplier relationships prevent late payments, capture early payment discounts, and optimise cash flow.

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Basware is a leader in P2P solutions that help organisations achieve full spend and process visibility. To learn more about how to improve your visibility across a P2P lifecycle, check out this free, on-demand webinar.