Real-time auditing in AP Automation

Analysts and AP professionals hail real-time auditing as a saving grace for three central challenges in AP Automation: ensuring on-time payments, filtering out anomalous invoices that don’t fit into the AP workflow, and near-perfect preparation for future audits. The suggestion that real-time auditing tackles all of these central AP challenges at once is indeed a daring thesis. To help you gain clarity on the real potential of real-time auditing, this blog investigates what stands behind the concept, and what it can deliver to your organisation in practice.

What is real-time auditing in AP Automation? 

Real-time auditing is, as the name suggests, a continuous auditing process embedded into your AP operations. In practice, auditing means any additional interaction with an invoice that ensures that you identify and pay the right amount against the right invoice. Real-time auditing, therefore, is not about auditing after the fact – it’s about identifying documents that require additional interactions during the AP process. Consequently, real-time auditing fits into the wider topic of exception and deviation handling.

Three central real-time auditing challenges in AP Automation

After all, in today’s world of AP Automation, improving AP processes is all about exception handling. Until your organisation reaches 100% spend visibility, it must identify and counter the challenges that bar the way to having full visibility on the entire in- and outflow of your financial streams. Not only are the following three challenges central to exception handling – they can actually be tackled by real-time auditing.

• Challenge one: On-time payments

  Through a better process of identifying the right invoices to be paid, the key KPI  of on-time payments can be improved. 

• Challenge two: Filtering out anomalous invoices

  For streamlined exception handling, invoices that carry an anomaly and therefore don’t fit into the workflow must be identified and highlighted. This way you ensure that only valid invoices undergo processing.  

• Challenge three: Audit preparedness

  A streamlined AP automation process ensures compliance with regulations in real-time. Through a real-time enforcing of regulations, future audits are significantly simplified. 

How Basware delivers automated real-time auditing in AP Automation

With Basware’s world-leading AP Automation solution, you can ensure that your organisation reaps all benefits that stand connected to real time auditing. 

Basware real-time auditing capabilities:

• Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML): These capabilities help identify invoices that have the potential of being paid late and prioritise those in the AP staff’s workload. 

• Duplicate invoice check: This check is an action-based standard rule that automatically flags duplicate invoices. For a precise identification of duplicate invoices, Basware AP Automation checks various data points (e.g. supplier name, invoice number, invoice data, invoice amount, and more) and can add PO numbers and invoice payment dates as additional validation steps. 

• Workload Management: This functionality helps to identify and address bottlenecks by assigning workload in a smart way. This helps you achieve more on-time payments. 

• Fraud-prevention: Our system automatically identifies changes in bank account information. In addition, the system can identify first-time suppliers or suppliers that are not on file yet – so your AP staff can investigate whether the invoice could potentially be a fraudulent invoice.

Key benefits of real-time auditing

Benefits: 

• Increased invoice processing efficiency my minimising exceptions and  anomalies

• On-time payments support healthy supplier relationships 

• Improved cash-flow: by filtering out invoices you will reject, you can spend more time on correct invoices 

• AP automation helps streamline regulation compliance 

• Fraud-prevention 

Ready to learn more? 

Staying on top of best-practices and developments in accounts payable and procurement is not an easy task. Our job at Basware is to take the complexity out of the AP and procurement process – so you can concentrate on the growth of your business. Are you interested in learning how Basware can take your AP processes to the next level? Click here to book a demo with our AP experts.