Finance Top 2 Priorities for 2016: AP Automation

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The message is clear – finance people want Accounts Payable automation to increase visibility, minimize the need to handle paper documents and reduce the risk of error in the AP process.

The message is clear – finance people want accounts payable automation to increase visibility, minimize the need to handle paper documents and reduce the risk of error in the AP process. According to The Institute of Finance & Management’s (IOFM) recent survey of several thousand North American AP financial professionals, when asked to list their “top two priorities for the next 12 months” the respondents listed these as two of the most important issues for their organizations for the coming year:

• Automated Workflows for Invoice Approval 39%
• Automated Workflows for Invoice Exceptions 37%

This is what we do. Having worked with organizations for over ten years, we understand the complexities inherent in moving information throughout your organization. Experienced at helping companies fine tune and streamline these processes, we do this by minimizing the manual touch points at which so many of your problems occur and in doing so we reduce errors and increase visibility and efficiency.

When researching the most appropriate and cost effective AP automation solution keep these points in mind. You will want to implement a solution that is easily configured, flexible and user friendly. And of course, your solution must increase efficiency and be cost effective.

Things to Consider:

Document matching and routing

Invoices should be automatically matched with purchase orders, contracts or other sources of identification- employee name, office location, department – then routed via workflow to relevant person for approval or exception handling, depending on your processing requirements.

Coding and approval

You should be able to set your own rules and based upon these rules, the correct account postings should be added to the invoice, which can then be automatically transferred to the correct approval workflow. Some solutions can even add workflow steps if additional approvals are needed based upon your specified authorization levels.

The more user-friendly solutions will allow your administrators to control your approval hierarchies, authorization amounts, account coding templates, workflow design, users and other critical business criteria.

Workflow configuration

The more advanced solutions feature a graphical designer that can be used by your administrators to quickly and easily create workflows and matching selections to meet your ever changing environment.