Like most business functions, accounting teams have faced a series of unprecedented challenges over the course of the last two years. With employees working remotely, activities like processing paper invoices and completing cheque payments proved to be highly problematic. In order to overcome these issues, organisations have turned to automated accounts payable (AP) solutions.
The increase of remote work caused by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has led to the global market for AP automation experiencing significant growth. According to Adroit Market Research, the AP automation market will exceed £3 billion by 2025. Businesses of all sizes are starting to reflect on the benefits of digitising their financial processes and shifting to electronic forms of payment.
An example of this growth in AP automation can be seen here at Quadient, as we’ve brought our automated AP solution, Beanworks, to the UK and France.
Quadient’s new solution
Beanworks has been growing in North America since 2012, with businesses now processing nearly £12 billion a year through the platform. The cloud-based AP workflow solution provides users with a multitude of benefits when it comes to accounting and financial teams seeking ways to simplify time-consuming invoice management processing, reduce potential fraud risks and manage AP while operating remotely.
This AP automation solution provides a faster, easier way to approve invoices, thus increasing efficiency, while it also significantly reduces the need for manual tasks. As well as this, it allows vendors to be paid from any location – irrespective of if employees are working in the office or remotely.
What’s more, Beanworks empowers every member of your AP team. For example, finance executives can reduce back-office expenses and make better decision through improved, real-time visibility into payables, while controllers are able to build a streamlined approvals process, ensuring vendors are paid quickly and work with increased productivity.
There are a number of beneficial features included in the Beanworks AP automation solution, such as:
- Allows users to build comprehensive, automated workflows to manage purchase orders and invoices, as well as payments and employee expenses. Therefore, by automating the entire AP workflow, it ensures the aforementioned accountancy activities are assigned to the correct person at each step in the process, reducing potential risks
- Payments can be approved and released in a quick and efficient manner – from anywhere. It is simple and easy to quickly search for an invoice, payment, purchase order or expense at any stage in the approval process
- Reduces costs. Manual AP processes tend to be expensive, with the average cost today to process an invoice standing at roughly £11. As an AI-powered data entry system, Beanworks reduces costs and streamlines the entire AP process, eliminating roughly 83 percent of data entry with automatic header and line-item data capture
- The comprehensive AP dashboard provides a real-time view of accruals and vendor spend
- Users can manage AP for all entities from just one central platform, while purchase orders can be easily matched to invoices
The new business process automation solutions are part of the commitment made by Quadient to support organisations as well as maintaining market leadership. This is done by providing additional features and continuous technological improvements in accordance with emerging e-invoicing regulations around the world.
You can find out more about Beanworks by Quadient here.
