There are plenty of reasons to use online accounting software such as QuickBooks but first and foremost, it helps businesses to centralize their financial processes. Instead of manually juggling complex spreadsheets, management can easily track the in- and outflow of money and boosting the ability to organize and management products and projects. What company wouldn't want to simplify their daily work routine with automated reports and workflows?
Yet, like any financial software, QuickBooks is a multi-purpose, generalist tool. This means that you risk missing out on some of the specific benefits offered by a dedicated automated invoice processing system. The way to avoid this? Integration with a powerful automated financial system provider such as Yooz that is purpose-built to streamline the entire accounts payable purchase-to-pay cycle will add enhanced features and capabilities that make a big difference.
What is QuickBooks?
QuickBooks is an accounting software package geared primarily towards small and medium-sized businesses. It offers both on-premises desktop-based applications as well as cloud-based versions. While the package handles payments, bill management, payroll functions, tracks inventory and sales, etc. - all customizable to address specific market needs such as the specific VAT and European tax systems - they also offer integration with other third-party software and financial services.
Yooz integrates seamlessly with QuickBooks to automate the Accounts Payable (AP) process, streamlining the entire AP workflow while providing insights into the entire process.
What are the Benefits of AP Automation?
A fast, efficient payable process is essential to growing your business. However, the pitfalls of a manual invoice workflow can be a major obstacle to this happening. From excess stacks of paper to storage costs, transportation to errors resulting from long, tedious hours of repetitive work... All of this hold back businesses and affect the supply chain. Consider just a few of the following questions faced by every business:
- How do you handle invoice and purchase order approvals when the person in charge has left, fallen ill or is on vacation?
- How much do you incur in weekly or monthly processing costs based on the number of invoices you handle?
- How many mistakes and errors would be avoidable by replacing a tedious and mostly repetitive invoice workflow with smart automation that requires little to no human intervention?
- And finally, how will automating the invoice workflow free up your team’s hands and minds, allowing them to focus on other tasks that add more value for the entire organization?
Accounts payable automation eliminates these concerns, removing the paper-based aspect and offers a higher level of insight to catch mistakes or other spending inefficiencies. In fact, by offering a simple, secure, and scalable workflow that's driven by the latest advances in technology, automation easily handles all the working challenges faced by the accounting department on a daily basis. Plus, with technology like robotic process automation and machine-learning algorithms work behind the scenes actively "learning,” the more you use it, the better it performs.
How AP Automation Helps Your Invoices to Help Your Business
The benefits of AP Automation translate directly towards your business' bottom line with tangible savings, productivity gains, and optimized cash management. These advantages accrue regardless of whether we're talking about a midsize company with a national or international footprint or a small business serving a local market. Some examples include:
Time savings
Accounts payable automation operates 24/7 without supervision; you don't see the same stack of work that builds up overnight during a manual invoice process. Instead, invoices are captured and details verified almost instantly, then automatically routed according to preset customizations. As a result, the time to process an invoice drops drastically from weeks or months to only days or even just hours. In addition, with a cloud-based automation platform anybody can get access at anytime from anywhere so there are no out-of-office delays or need to transport paperwork between locations. Nothing gets lost and every action, amount, and word in an invoice is indexed, stored, and easily searchable by keyword for future access. Finally, a cloud-based automation platform is easily updated so it will run the latest, more reliable and advanced software.
Security
AP automation offers a higher level of oversight into invoice processing, allowing you to catch spending inefficiencies such as duplicate payments or errors involving purchase orders or good received notes. Little details like a duplicate invoice number, an incomplete product code, or a change in bank account information are flagged for further review. This decreases the number of invoice exceptions that would otherwise need to be handled. And, by recording the entire invoice workflow process, legal compliance and audits are simplified with records available within minutes.
Cost savings
The best way to optimizing your spend management is to know where the capital is going. Invoice automation provides you with a higher level of oversight to catch these inefficiencies, from duplicate or overpayments to late fees. In addition, by eliminating all of the paper-related costs such as the paper themselves and storage, any business can reduce their spending and improve their budget. In addition, automation ensures that payments occur on time. No more late fees! Instead, you'll be able to reap the benefits of early-pay discounts. In fact, Yooz customers report almost 80% in overall cost savings per invoice processed.
Relationship improvement
Speaking of timely payments, ensuring that your bills are paid on time and being able to answer questions at any stage of the process is a sure way to improve both customer and vendor relationships. In this every-changing economy, being able to stay in sync with your supplier accounts just may provide the edge over your competitors.
Employee satisfaction
By eliminating the daily routine work tasks, employees are freed for more challenging and strategic work that helps them grow. It replaces tedious work with more freedom and flexibility to work from anywhere. It allows for them to spend precious time on real problems or pursuing other, more strategic activities that bring their creativity and curiosity to the fore. The new technology helps develop additional skillsets and in fact, supports further digitalization in the business.
Insight
Besides saving time and money, augmenting and enhancing your QuickBooks investment with AP automation has some more, not so obvious benefits. Since the entire workflow from purchase to payment is fed back into your accounting system, you can almost instantly tap into a higher level of financial insight, driven by real-time information, one invoice at a time. AP automation makes pulling those reports in QuickBooks more valuable, leading to faster and better decision making.
Agility
Automation means that your workflow can be quickly adjusted, customized and tweaked to accommodate for changes. Say, someone on the team is taking time off or a supplier needs a little more attention. All relevant documents can be called up remotely on any mobile device from anywhere. In addition, a cloud-based platform such as Yooz is easily scalable according to your businesses needs. There are no fixed contracts; you pay only for what you use.
QuickBooks Plus AP Automation Saves Time and Money
So why add outside AP automation for Quickbooks? Because QuickBooks isn't fully optimized for the accounts payable process, integration with a dedicated AP automation platform save both time and money with every purchase order (PO) and every invoice. The entire workflow becomes more system versus people driven, with information stored in the system and easily scalable according to business needs. Data only has to be entered once; the information exchange between the two systems is automated so any information is shared in real-time.
An end-to-end automation solution also accounts for streamlining the payment process. YoozPay, for example, allows vendors to be easily onboarded with a single email address. They can then choose their preferred form of payment (electronic, credit card, etc.) Bookkeeping has arguably never been easier.
What Does It All Mean
QuickBooks ap automation integration with a platform such as Yooz provides businesses with a better, more comprehensive, and customized payable process. Small and medium-sized businesses have access to the same technology as larger organizations and reap similar benefits. The ability to achieve a highly optimized process means that it's worth writing a new chapter with your QuickBooks installation. One with straight-through processing, where humans have to rarely or never touch an invoice once captured by the system. One which save time and money. And one which gives the smart minds working at your business an even better reason to stick around.
