In a world led by digitization and the internet of things, do you still want to rely on Excel spreadsheets and paper documentation for generating and processing invoices? Investing ample time in invoice generation is necessary to maintain a favourable accounts payable workflow. The majority of the businesses and companies globally, spend impressive amounts on hiring top-level team of professionals to handle the entire accounts payable invoice processing.
Yet, with every potential growth and expansion possibility within a business, the burden of accurate invoice processing can overwhelm the employees in charge and lead to gaps within the accounts payable reconciliation.
Signs To Shift To AP Automation
The key responsibilities involved with maintaining a proper accounts payable workflow is handling and processing payment approvals on time, maintaining budgetary limitations, updating accounting systems in use and following all required policies and compliances levied on the business.
Failure to complete these requirements can adversely affect the business profitability and productivity and so some common signs that indicate your business requirement to shift to AP automation include the following,
Requirement for Optimization of Working Capital
Initially, the requirement for working capital optimisation was limited to companies with higher payment volume i.e. processing about 50 invoices daily minimum.
However, today, almost all companies have increased invoicing volume and so it is becoming tiresome and tedious for the manual employees to carry out account payable tasks by hand. An account payable automation software helps and successfully manages to streamline the payments for all company sizes. Some of such top softwares include BautoDocs or Cognitive Content Capture by Bautomate.
Increased Need For Invoice Data Entry Accuracy
Depending on the business Sale and level of operations, the inflow of data can vary greatly. Additionally, an increase in manpower headcount can also increase the inflow of data while reducing the overall bottom-line profit for a business as expenses increase. This excess data is then required for invoice process and generation.
With the help of the optical character recognition software by BautoDocs, a software by Bautomate, you can successfully enjoy accounts payable invoice processing without duplication of work, incorrect data entry, loss of previous invoices, etc. The electronic validation of invoices through such accounts payable automation software can reduce the gaps between purchase order data and invoice data entry.
Target Inefficient Time Management
Manual tasks involved with invoice generation and payment procedures can lead to an increase in efficiency of the overall accounting team, putting out a bad name for the company in question as well. However, as a company, it is your responsibility to judge the inflow of data entry and the number of invoices required on a daily basis to decide whether AP automation is the right solution for you.
Accounts payable automation software like C3 by Bautomate, offers advanced OCR, ICR and IDR technology that can single-handedly extract required data from the previous invoices and tally. Additionally, they also offer the accessibility option on any device and store all required key information to help for future invoicing. This increases the overall time management efficiency of a company as a whole.
Improve Vendor Relations with Increased Transparency
In order to maintain business relationships with your suppliers, it is highly important to have the necessary visibility about the status and analytics involved in invoice processing and generation. Just as important as it is for businesses to generate the right invoices, it is the expectation of the vendor supplier to be informed about the invoice payments.
Now, to keep the vendor suppliers happy, an accounts payable automation software solution can effectively reduce the communication gap, if any. Additionally, proceed with a more streamlined operational process to overlook the daily operations and keep the vendors informed throughout. This increased transparency directly affects the overall profitability and balance sheet of a company.
Additionally, as vendors are key stakeholders in a business, keeping them happy is a top priority. Softwares like C3 by Bautomate offer increased transparency and visibility between a business and a supplier vendor. This way, the potential scare of inaccurate data entry and payment claims no longer worries the companies.
Why Should You Opt For AP Automation?
Now that you are well aware of the factors that can act as possible anchors to encourage the shift from manual to automation, let us dig deeper and see how it can help your company. Transferring some important accounting activities like invoicing and payments on a cloud platform will allow more time for the employees to focus on the key goals of your company. Thus, top advantages of opting for AP automation include the following:
- One key advantage of Accounts Payable automation software is to get a better control and hold of the overall processes and compliances involved with the level of revenue of your company.
- With AP automation, you can plan to expand or grow in the existing market or target a whole new market without having the need of hiring a fresh talented group of professionals.
- You can benefit from faster process efficiency along with reduced overall operational costs for your business.
- Accounts Payable workflow holds high weightage in the overall operations of any business and so by improving the performance and processes within this can allow better attention for the core business activities.
- AP automation allows you to identify the loopholes or potential gaps in the workflow to give you ample time to distribute the workload accordingly, without hampering the company’s efficiency and profitability.
There is no right time to switch to AP automation as the future is cloud. Therefore, it is smarter to opt for accounts payable automation software today to better familiarise yourself and your employees with its work to benefit from it at a bigger level in the coming years. Human resources are no longer meant to be filing data and manually creating invoices.
Their expertise lies in analysing the overall operational processes and suggesting backups and contingency plans in case of need. So do not tire out your employees and exhaust their creativity by handing them the tasks around invoicing.
Instead, let them explore and become better assets for you and your business in the future as you never know what else they can offer until you give them the opportunity.
