Small business owners understand that one wrong decision can cause serious harm to their bottom line.
That’s why leaders need every tool at their disposal to assist them in making informed decisions based on insightful data. Accounts payable automation solutions offer the required visibility into their accounting systems to help guide the business toward sustainable profitability.
Real-Time Visibility into Financial Data
Access to quality real-time data is critical to effective cash management and strategic decision-making. Automated AP systems provide complete visibility into invoice data when the invoice is entered into the system. The information is stored permanently in the cloud and updated in real-time as the invoice progresses through the approval and payment cycles.
AP automation also includes dispute resolution capabilities that support customer and supplier communications, helping to ensure quality invoice information. This feature is helpful for auditing purposes and helps you manage supplier inquiries with unparalleled speed and efficiency.
The insights provided by automated AP systems lead to more accurate and reliable data, which is critical to strategic financial planning and cash flow forecasting.
Generating Insights through Data Analysis
Proactive business leaders are always looking for ways to save time and money to make their enterprise financially healthier and more profitable in the long run. Data analysis through AP automation is critical in reaching these goals.
For example, you can perform a detailed payments analysis to determine how long it takes to pay an invoice after receiving it. This information helps you monitor your payments to see if they’re being made on time, opening up opportunities to identify and solve process bottlenecks in the approval process, take advantage of early payment discounts, avoid late payment penalties, and improve supplier relationships.
You can also perform predictive analysis to estimate and negotiate invoice turnaround times for future purchases from existing and new suppliers.
Identifying Cost-Saving Opportunities
By switching to an automated AP solution, you’ll be able to process invoices much faster than through manual processes, reducing your invoice processing costs.
For example, the Institute of Finance & Management has reported that companies using limited or no AP automation spend $8.78 to process a single invoice. That number drops to $1.77 per invoice with companies using automated systems.
There is also a significant drop in labour costs. Your accounting team can spend less time manually processing, filing, and retrieving paper invoices
Automated AP systems can also catch fraudulent invoices before payment is issued by identifying anomalies and mismatches between a purchase order and its associated invoice. This feature eliminates the need for time-consuming fraud investigations.
In terms of office supplies, AP automation can save you money by reducing the use of cheques, paper, postage, envelopes, additional filing cabinets, and more.
All these savings add to better cash flow, opening up additional opportunities when deciding how to innovate to build your company.
Strategic Resource Allocation
Accounts payable automation removes the need to enter invoice data into your ERP system manually, allowing your AP team to focus on other important, less repetitive tasks. It also reduces human error and improves data accuracy through advanced and accurate OCR capabilities that convert scanned documents into data stored in the cloud AP system. The information is easily updated and retrievable with just a few keystrokes.
With less paper to file, you’ll also cut down on storage costs, enabling you to re-allocate “dead” areas used for filing cabinets for more productive activities.
Perhaps best of all, you’ll have the financial insights necessary to forecast cash flow and plan future growth initiatives.
Make the Switch to AP Automation
Automating your end-to-end accounts payable workflow improves the invoicing process’ overall efficiency and allows you to access the data required to develop sound business growth strategies.
However, an essential element of successfully transitioning into AP automation is partnering with a company offering robust solutions to help you reach your business goals.
Ash Conversions International (ACI) has specialized in transforming how companies run their daily business processes with efficient, cost-effective solutions for over 40 years.
We developed two tech-driven options designed to optimize your AP processes and provide you with the necessary insights to make informed strategic business decisions:
AP Assistant™
Put the full power of AP automation to work for your enterprise business with this robust, cost-effective solution
AP Assistant Lite™
An innovative hybrid solution specifically designed for SMEs that need to improve efficiencies, cut costs, and reduce manual tasks
Both solutions provide complete AP invoice visibility, easy invoice routing for approvals, one centralized cloud-based location for invoice processing and retrieval, robust workflow reporting, and many more features that will give your business sustainable profitability through decision-making based on reliable intelligence.
For more information on how your organization can benefit by automating the accounts payable process, call us at 800-719-9621 or click the button below.
