Five things controllers need to know about AP
As a controller, your responsibility is to oversee and manage the overall accounting workflow for your AP team.
You are likely aware that AP is a lot harder than it looks – invoice entry, approval tracking, payment disbursements, and healthy vendor relationship maintenance are all par for the course for most AP team members. What you might not know is how draining these manual tasks are, and how much AP automation helps.
In this blog post, we'll look at the top 5 things every controller should know about AP automation to help their AP team succeed.
Bypass The Bottleneck
Processing invoices manually is one of the biggest time sinks for AP teams. It's tedious, prone to human error, and places a serious drag on team resources. Here are some of the major pain points:
- Manual invoice keying: It can take a team member 3-5 days to process an invoice manually. If an error is uncovered, it often takes twice as much time to fix.
- Invoice approval routing: Several manual follow-ups are often required to complete an invoice's approval journey. This is especially true if your team works remotely.
How long does it take your team to process an invoice? Find out using Quadient AP's ROI calculator.
AP automation bypasses these bottlenecks to keep the work flowing, enabling AP teams to process invoices up to 9 times faster compared to manual methods. It also provides end-to-end visibility during the approval process, automating reminders and freeing up AP teams to focus on other aspects of your AP workflow.
Make Money Instead of Throwing It Away
There are several pitfalls where manually reliant AP teams often lose money. AP automation provides both money-saving and money-making opportunities that contribute to a healthier bottom line:
| AP challenge | With automation | Without automation |
| Streamlined invoice processing | Automation delivers a 9X faster invoice processing time, resulting in a savings of 60 - 80% processing costs. | The cost of processing a single invoice manually can be as high as USD $15. |
| Vendor discounts | 65% of vendors offer early payment discounts to their customers and the average discount is around 2%. | Failing to take advantage of these discounts is literally leaving money on the table. |
| Digital payment methods | Automated vendor payments eliminate the threat of late payments and payment penalties.
Digital payment methods like virtual cards can earn up to 1.1% cash back while eliminating expensive and fraud-prone paper checks. | Paper-based payment methods are expensive and slow.
A single check costs US$4 to US$20 to process, and late or lost payments lead to additional penalties. |
Work Smarter, Not Harder
Approximately 86% of accounting teams still process AP tasks manually. For 40% of them, these tasks consume at least a quarter of their workweek. In today's economic climate, where organizations are constantly seeking ways to better spend their operational dollars, this wasted time is an expense that companies simply can't afford.
Automating your AP invoice workflow avoids this wasted time; eliminating up to 83% of manual data entry. This frees up your AP team members to contribute more strategically and economically to your organization's bottom line.
Avoid Errors
No matter how good your AP team is, it's inevitable that errors will occur. In a manual AP process, there are so many opportunities for things to go wrong: from manual data entry to erroneous invoice coding, to broken or incorrect spreadsheet formulas. These mistakes cost both time and money and open the door for fraudulent activities to take hold.
A smart AP automation solution protects you from these potential pitfalls. Quadient AP's AI-enhanced automation features such as Item Capture and SmartCode automatically code invoices and line items, delivering a 99% invoice accuracy rate while reducing the opportunity for human error and saving countless hours on reconciliation.
Stamp Out Fraud
AP is a vulnerable function for companies and a lucrative opportunity for fraudsters — both internally and externally. The more your AP team relies on manual, paper-based processes, the more opportunities bad actors have to submit fake invoices, initiate fraudulent payments, request invented expense repayments, or redirect valid payments to invalid bank accounts.
AP automation provides end-to-end transparency in your AP workflow, facilitating preventative solutions like multi-step approvals for purchase orders, invoices, payments and expense reimbursements.
Quadient AP is The Solution
Implementing Quadient's AP automation solution will provide your AP team with the tools they need to operate more efficiently and securely.
Schedule a demo today to find out more about how Quadient AP empowers your team.
