The Strategic Value of Paperless Accounts Payable

Many an Accounts Payable (AP) Manager has laid awake at night and dreamt of how productive their staff could be if they didn’t have to search, sort, file and manually enter data from a mountain of invoices day after day. These docs are the bane of every AP manager’s existence. AP automation is the solution – remove the invoice handling from your process and allow your AP staffers to focus on work that has a greater impact on your organization than merely searching, sorting and filing paper all day.

Below are 5 higher-value tasks that an AP automation solution allows your AP processors to focus on:

1. Increase communication with partners and vendors

Being able to consistently communicate and strengthen relationships with your most important partners and vendors isn’t just a luxury, it’s a necessity. Unfortunately, too many companies can’t allocate the resources required to handle this all-important function. With the additional resources AP automation affords, you can ensure that your key business relationships are consistently nurtured.

2. Clean vendor master list

When scanning your master vendor list, you will undoubtedly find vendors that have duplicate entries or outdated information. Being able to devote a current resource to ensuring that all information on this list is accurate and up to date is a nice benefit of AP automation.

3. Negotiate early payment discounts with vendors

Whether they know it or not, companies are leaving thousands, hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions of dollars of savings a year on the table by not taking advantage of early payment discounts. The enhanced visibility that AP automation provides allows your organization to take advantage of these discounts. And in many cases, you will have the available staff to look for and negotiate even more of these discounts.

4. Help error-prone vendors

All AP departments deal with vendors who send out invoices loaded with errors. Being able to allocate current resources that can solve these problems on a case-by-case basis will have a huge impact on workflow efficiency and an impact to the bottom-line.

5. Review current financial controls for fraud prevention

In its 2020 Report to the Nations on Occupational Fraud and Abuse, the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners stated the typical organization loses five percent of revenue annually due to fraud. Freeing up AP personnel to review your company’s current financial controls is a huge step toward fraud prevention and can literally help save your company tons of money each year.