As millions of businesses around the United Kingdom and the entire world continue to deal with fallout from the global pandemic, their employees have learned to cope with the so-called “new normal”. They’ve come up with smart and streamlined solutions to keep operations running. Orders must be filled and shipped, queries and RFPs answered, POs and bills processed, and vendors paid on time so their supply chain and cash flow don’t suffer, let alone become irreparably damaged. It’s becoming increasingly clear that an essential part of this adjustment is to improve financial efficiency through accounts payable automation.
It’s a goal most organizations strive for even in normal times, albeit with admittedly mixed results. When the economy is stressed, it’s even more important to get the most out of your Accounts Payable (AP) process and truly future proof it. You could argue that the past few years has been a not-so-gentle nudge to finally get your digital transformation under way. Why?
Having the right tools at your disposal and reaping their full range of benefits will go a long way toward ensuring business success and providing satisfaction on many levels. Accounts Payable process improvement - specifically in the form of automation - pays a handsome dividend when it works because it accomplishes quite a lot. Invoices are automatically ingested, intelligently indexed, routed and GL-coded, swiftly flagged for exceptions and approved without delays so they can be paid electronically and securely archived in the cloud. And all of that can happen with as little human intervention as possible.
Why so much is at stake with the accounts payable process
Now add to that list of benefits the capability to leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) to sift and scour your paperwork to surface emerging business insights. While this kind of financial intelligence is valuable for short term tasks such as catching duplicates, avoiding late fees, or locking in discounts with vendors and suppliers it also helps companies strategically plan ways to improve their overall cash management. With all these positives, shouldn't improving accounts payable efficiency be high up on every company's list of priorities?
To explore further, even through the advantages are clear, why exactly should focusing on how to improve accounts payable processing be one of the highest-stake tasks for any modern business?
Because far too many companies still rely on time-consuming, error-prone and expensive manual processes. They receive invoices - sometimes hundreds, often thousands of them - in various forms from paper to electronic. Consider those that arrive by mail and need to be opened and sorted through before they can be scanned and digitized, or they manually enter the data into their various Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. Throughout every step of the process, mistakes can sneak in and erroneous submissions can wend their way through to the approval stage. Mistakes and errors that have financial consequences for the entire organization.
Reducing the costs of the accounts payable process
Even if nothing goes wrong - and that’s a big if - it costs between £3 - £13 per document on average to manually process an invoice and it can entail a cycle-time of several weeks, exposing a company to the risk of missing payments and incurring late fees.
Wasting time and money this way has secondary effects that might not be obvious at first glance. We’re talking wasted opportunities to optimize cash management, boost team morale, and also improve the relationship with vendors. In the long run, it pays to bring suppliers into the AP loop so they have access to the information that lets them know where their invoices are and helps them to feel that they are part of the process.
Now it’s time for a quick reality check. Ask yourself:
- Does it take your team more than four days to process an invoice?
- Is it costing you more than to process a single invoice?
- Do you have to manually verify if an invoice reflects exactly what your company ordered before you process a vendor's invoice for payment?
If that scenario sounds painfully familiar and your accounts payable process seems complicated and overwhelming, let’s explore a better way to handle invoices and make noticeable accounts payable process improvements.
How to streamline the accounts payable process in the cloud
Streamlining the entire Accounts Payable process with a cutting-edge, cloud-based platform such as Yooz provides almost immediate improvements and tangible savings that will quickly benefit the entire company and delight the entire accounts payable team.
Speed and Savings
A cloud-based platform can be securely up and running in a minimal amount of time. And that’s true no matter whether your company has just one office or is handling invoices and expense reports from many locations, including an international footprint. It’s the intelligent and powerful way to receive invoices in any format, since artificial intelligence capabilities enable the software to read and understand every invoice word by word, amount by amount. Intelligent software learns as you go and recognizes each vendor’s particular document templates, getting smarter with every invoice it sees and able to quickly GL code and route it for approval.
As a result, it costs less to process invoices and cycle time is cut from weeks to mere hours. Yooz customers, for example, spend on average £2.61 per invoice and cut their cycle time from weeks to mere hours. A company that processes 250 invoices a month, for instances, can cut its annual processing costs from between £9,000 and £39.000 to £7,830 or generate up to £31,170 in recurring savings. You can use our savings calculator to learn more. What’s more, accounts payable automation opens additional avenues for savings such as locking in discounts for early payment and enjoying dynamic rebates.
Transparency
Having access to continuously improved machine-learning features translates into better and more timely insights for the accounts payable department as well as the entire organization. Locating an invoice to check an exception, hunting down duplicates, or matching invoices with purchase orders becomes as easy as using a regular search engine in your browser. Filing, retrieval, and audits are no longer a headache, and authorized users can perform searches where and whenever they need to across the entire landscape of submitted invoices. The data that accumulates over time can be analyzed and visualized as well to make smarter decisions about optimizing cash flow and supply or negotiating better terms with partners.
Mobility
As long-term working from home mandates have made clear, a modern business needs to be resilient and shock-proof to keep on humming even when the office sits idle. Thanks to automation, team members are no longer stuck with a backlog of paper-based processes while working in a remote environment. If invoices live and are processed in the cloud, the people you authorize can view and approve documents from any device, anywhere, anytime. The same goes for your vendors who can use a customized portal to submit and track their invoices without tying up accounts payable staff to answer queries.
Mobility in the larger sense means that your accounts payable experts are freed from performing repetitive tasks. Leaving those chores to smart automation lets the team focus on the areas where experienced humans really add value, say cultivating good relationships with vendors and partners or driving ongoing process innovation in their domain.
Zero Risk
A cutting-edge platform to improve your accounts payable process should liberate your business in many ways. To be free to pursue ideas on how to grow the business, how to do more with less, how to choose and update the technology and tools that suit your needs and business processes. Plus, with a cloud-based solution, it’s inherently safer and more secure to store and process invoices than with an on-premises solution (yes, some smaller shops still rely on spreadsheets on a desktop with all the well-documented vulnerabilities).
Automating the accounts payable process with Yooz: a zero risk proposition
Although any business should get a quick return on their investment into an AP automation platform, Yooz makes sure this is the case. There is no vendor lock-in with Yooz since customers are billed per use per month and have the freedom to cancel at any time. In addition, since Yooz plays well with almost any ERP and financial software out there, from Sage Intacct and Intuit Quickbooks to Microsoft Dynamics GP. Our platform easily and seamlessly integrates with more than 250 of the most popular software offerings.
Making the journey to improve your accounts payable process and in the end achieve end-to-end automation has never been easier, thanks to Yooz. It’s a journey that pays for itself and will get your organization ready for the future. While we realize the current business climate is trying, it also offers a unique chance to make that leap. Let Yooz be the catalyst to change your company’s Accounts Payable process and turn it from a cost center into a profit contributor. Reach out for a free demonstration today with one of our AP automation experts and see the benefits for yourself.
