Automating Your Accounts Payable Process: 5 Benefits

Looking to optimize your Accounts Payable (AP) processes? Look no further. Automating your accounts payable process is the game-changing solution that not only streamlines operations but also eliminates manual tasks, freeing your team to focus on strategic initiatives. It’s a simple shift with powerful results — and it’s the key to building your most efficient AP department yet.

Automating Your Accounts Payable Process for Long-Term Scalability

Beyond immediate cost savings and efficiency, automating your accounts payable process lays the groundwork for long-term scalability and adaptability. As your business grows, manual AP workflows become increasingly unsustainable. With automation, you can handle larger volumes of invoices, integrate seamlessly with ERP systems, and ensure compliance with evolving regulations — all without adding headcount. By investing in automation now, you're future-proofing your AP function for continued success.

1.Automate to avoid costly duplicate and late payment

How much time has your team wasted with late payments or correcting duplicate payments? If your answer is anything greater than “no time at all,” you’re missing out. PO to invoice matching is often the main culprit of slow payment processes due to missing information. Automatic matching not only hastens this tedious process but also, by automating, data is continuously collected. This means that it learns the more it processes and eventually, you could achieve a totally hands-off AP.

2. Automate to reduce your paper trail

Paper is messy, disorganised, and not to mention pretty terrible for the environment. So, if you’re pushing paper across the desks of your AP department, the only thing you’re contributing to is confusion and negatively impacting the environment. Receiving and processing business documents digitally keep documents organised, secure and easily accessible.

3.Automate to gain better visibility

Without visibility into your operations and finances, it’s hard to strategically improve anything. More so, it’s like taking swings in the dark and hoping you’ll make contact with something. Manual processes create siloes of information without one source to access and analyse your data. But automating your accounts payable process not only drives data creation and automates the collection of that data it also informs analytics that you can use to locate bottlenecks, discern areas for improvement, and even set meaningful KPIs.

4.Automate to take advantage of early payment discounts

As mentioned earlier, paper is slow. And with mistakes, it slows down even more. Suppliers could be left waiting for their payments – and if they wait too long, this could strain your relationship with them. Similarly, with slow AP processing comes missed early payment discounts. Automating payments gets your supplier paid quicker and allows you to capture discounts. It’s a win-win.

5. Automate to set and track KPIs

With automation comes data collection, with data collection comes visibility, and with visibility comes a way to track and measure AP’s key performance indicators (KPIs). Using your payments data, you can monitor performance on an ongoing basis and take into account KPIs such as days payable outstanding (DPO), processing costs, approval times, and early payment discount amounts.

Learn more about automating your accounts payable process

Hoping to learn more about AP Automation solutions? Check out more here.