How poor visibility into accounts payable information is costing you money

Today’s cutthroat economy requires businesses to make decisions faster than ever. Businesses need instant insight into their financial position and the status of their people and processes.

But manual and semi-automated accounts payable processes undermine decision-making with poor visibility.

Manual and semi-automated AP processes limit visibility because:

• Essential information is not captured
• Data is poorly organized
• Information is not timely
• Systems are not well-integrated
• Decision-makers do not have access to key variables

As a result, it is difficult for businesses to:

• Manage working capital
• Tightly control spending
• Identify compliance and security risks

Poor visibility also puts AP departments at a big disadvantage to their peers with full automation.

Optimizing AP processes requires organizations to know metrics such as their average time to process an invoice, their number of invoices per vendor, and their number of duplicate invoices. What’s more, managers must have ready access to the number of invoices and exceptions their staff processes each day, and the average time it takes a worker to process an invoice. And managing cash flow requires visibility into accruals, liabilities, available early-payment discounts, and cash on hand.

This information is hard to access in a manual or semi-automated AP environment.

Fully automating AP with electronic invoicing improves visibility into financial information. Full automation centralizes financial information in one platform, delivering information whenever, and wherever, users need it. Once information is under control, AP departments have total visibility into their processes, documents and financial position, as well as compliance and security requirements.

Fully automated AP systems accomplish this in four ways:

1. Business activity monitoring: real-time visibility into the status and results of AP processes
2. Graphical dashboards: real-time visibility into system, process and financial data
3. Exceptions reports: information on invoices and other documents that contain errors
4. Reporting: configurable reports that provide users with valuable information on trends, productivity metrics, financial information and more, via a PC, laptop or mobile device

Want to learn more about how poor visibility into AP information may be costing your business money? Download our complimentary white paper, “Stop Throwing Money Down the Drain: 5 Reasons to Embrace Full AP Automation.”