5 Strategies to Automate the Month-End Process for AP
Introduction
For accounting teams, month-end is a stressful time, characterised by long hours of overtime and punctuated by last-minute scrambles for missing information.
The month-end close process is essential to businesses as a regular financial health check through which the business may reconcile, aggregate, and report on their financial information. Surveys report that the reality is much more complex for those tasked with executing month-end. While 87% of accounting professionals say they work overtime during this process, the resulting stress has been directly tied to employee turnover in one-quarter of surveyed* organisations.
Automation can help alleviate the manual tasks and stress associated with month-end. Let’s examine five specific strategies to automate the accounts payable process.
01 Eliminate accounts payable data entry
Data entry is such an essential component of most accounting processes, and yet it is also one of the least loved tasks. Manual data entry requires an allocation of resources, and the chance of errors cropping up can create more inefficiencies over time.
By automating the data entry portion of the accounts payable process, you will not only speed up month-end, but also save countless hours throughout the rest of the month, which can be applied to more complex tasks that require your expert oversight.
One way to eliminate data entry is with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) solutions. These can help digitise invoices with more efficiency than manual typing. However, no OCR solutions are 100% accurate and still require manual intervention to complete the data entry.
With Quadient AP, your data entry is taken care of with guaranteed accuracy. How do we do it? First, a digital copy of each invoice is captured, and the invoice data is extracted and checked for accuracy before the digital invoices are made available to you in the Quadient AP application for coding.
We also make coding easy. Our SmartCoding feature intuitively learns how you code based on previous invoices you have processed. SmartCoding automatically adopts the line coding from the last invoice that came from the same supplier. Everything from GL line coding to description is carried over.
02 Speed up the approval process
While manual data entry can easily eat up hours of time, so can delays. The most common cause for delay in AP usually happens during approvals. If you’re used to handling paper invoices—and old-school hand-written signature approvals—then those delays will crop up as invoices languish on desks, unsigned. Even with electronic invoices, you’ll end up printing copies or chasing approvals through email.
It’s possible to digitise approvals cloud with electronic signature solutions such as DocuSign. With these solutions, you can upload your documents for each approver to sign electronically. However, this would still require time to upload each invoice. Keeping track of where each document sits in the approval process would still have to be done manually.
Accounts payable automation solutions solve this by bringing the whole approval process into the cloud and creating a structured set-up that instantly routes invoices based on your client’s approval hierarchy. The cloud-based environment makes it possible to approve invoices from any device, regardless of the actual approver’s physical location.
With Quadient AP, collaboration is built right into the solution. In just a few clicks, you can route an invoice, purchase order, or payment to another user and include your comments. Using our dashboards and robust search functionality, you can even track each invoice to see exactly where it is in the approval process at any time.
“In just a few clicks, you can route an invoice to another user and include your comments.”
03 Automate across teams and companies
If you’re going to automate accounts payable, you’ll want to use a solution that gives you the power to monitor and process invoices from one place.
File management solutions like Google Drive for Business can help you store all of your AP documents in one place and manage who has access to which documents. However, this doesn’t give you visibility or aggregation across the entire AP workflow process. This will also require some duplicate data entry to properly tag invoices that they can be found in searches.
Ideally, you’ll want to bring entire teams, departments, or locations into the automated AP process. Every user and approver should have individual access to your AP automation solution. Quadient AP makes this simple by allowing you to customise access by user.
Ensure that your AP automation solution includes a multi-entity feature, so that you can manage data for all your legal entities from a centralised system, without having to log in and log out to access each one. With Quadient AP, you can manage multiple company database files all from the same solution, even when your clients are using different application databases.
04 Get full visibility through enhanced reporting
While speeding up month-end is a huge benefit of automation, it isn’t the only factor accountants should consider. Businesses these days are under much more intense scrutiny from regulators and other financial bodies. As such, there is also a clear demand for a higher level of financial governance and full transparency across organisations.
Business Intelligence (BI) platforms such as Tableau can help you dive into your accounts payable data for deeper insights, however these require a specific skill set to use and time to set up. Your ERP’s reporting systems can also be leveraged, but these often lack information about AP workflow processes, such as how long approvers spend before moving invoices to the next stage in the approval process.
AP automation makes it simple to get full visibility into all your accounts payable data through on-demand reports.
Custom filters and reports open up a vast toolkit that gives you the power to drill down into your historical data to uncover trends and measure productivity. Pre-set reports can also keep you on track with regular, scheduled check ups.
05 Access a single source of truth through a centralised database
Your accounting data should be accessible from a single source, and that source shouldn’t be at the bottom of a file cabinet. Digitisation has created a new reality for accounting with the advent of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and robust accounting applications that aggregate and systematise your data.
As you add third-party applications to your accounting system, seamless integration ensures that your single source of truth remains exactly that. A successful AP automation solution will be able to sync with your accounting software and ensure that your database is always current
Quadient AP imports all lists from your accounting system so they are available for coding right away. You can also import other transactions from your system such as payments and purchase order feed.
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