We’ve done the research, polled our clients over the last few years, and the numbers don’t lie. There isn’t a single Controller, CFO, or AP clerk who enjoys the labor-intensive, time-consuming process of hunting down invoices, reconciling endless payments, and following elusive paper trails. While saving time is an obvious benefit when you decide to automate an accounting process, it’s often the cost savings that has a more pronounced effect on a company’s cash flow. Let’s talk about some of the ways that cloud solutions for Accounts Payable automation can save an organization money.
Only Pay For What You Use
In many cases, pricing for software-as-as-solution (SaaS) AP systems is transaction-based. Take Quadient Accounts Payable Automation by Beanworks as an example: rather than charging you one huge fee to use our system, we only bill you per transaction so the costs adjust with your company. This means businesses affected by seasonality can allocate funds to other strategic resources during slow times and then pick up the pace again when it gets busy.
Where Did My Resources Go?
You hired talented accounting professionals to help you run your department only to have them file invoices, make photocopies, manually key in data, and field questions from vendors who are waiting on payments. Manual processes just aren’t efficient and, quite frankly, it’s a poor use of great talent—talent which could be used for more strategic tasks like fraud prevention, risk management, improved vendor sourcing, and spend management.
Why bury your staff in data entry when you can automate the majority of the AP workflow and redirect the team’s focus towards high value-add activities? Let the system handle straightforward invoices automatically and give your eagle-eyed staff more time to deal with true transactional exceptions. The result is improved departmental efficiency and employee performance.
Maximizing Quality And Minimizing Errors
Accounting departments and managers like having real-time visibility into the status of current liabilities. It’s a control thing and the concept isn’t lost on us. So, when Controllers and CFOs have to wait for data to get manually entered into the system before they can see the company’s liabilities, we understand the frustration. Combine this with rushed manual data entry, keying errors, incorrectly categorized invoices, misfiled documents, and duplicate invoices getting into the system, and you have a dire recipe for system-compromising issues.
The goal of AP automation is to allow for more visibility and control over the entire AP process. Maintaining the quality of all data entering the system and tightening the belt around workflow rules minimizes errors. At the same time, automatically tracking invoices and transactions from start to finish makes audits a breeze, ensures workflows are more efficient and frees your team up for more strategic activities. So, what are you waiting for? Book a demo with a Quadient AP automation expert today!
