3 High Value AP Opportunities You Can't Afford to Miss
Help AP transform from a cost center to revenue generator and strategic partner.
Explore these three key opportunities to change the way your organization handles accounts payable challenges and realizes new efficiencies, or download a copy to take with you.
The financial workhorse of most companies—accounts payable—often goes operationally overlooked, not to mention unappreciated.
Don’t make this mistake. Your AP department is certainly operationally critical because every company needs to pay its vendors and suppliers. Behind the predictable transactions is an area that’s ripe for strategic transformation.
Help your department tackle some of its most pressing challenges, and you’ll introduce a new era for AP—one in which the function is no longer a cost center, but is instead a revenue generator and strategic partner.
Why Automate Your AP?
46%of companies view AP as having some or little value, despite the critical function the department serves.
Source: Ardent Partners, The State of ePayables 2019
important things to note
Two huge challenges facing AP
Challenge #1: Manual processes
A lack of automation in AP may not seem like an inherent challenge for teams with comfortable, well-worn workflows. However, maintaining the status quo actually means you’re neglecting AP best practices your competitors have embraced, thereby suffering productivity losses and hindering your ability to scale as volume increases.
Paper checks, paper invoices, manual data entry, and manual approval routing demand extra work and time that hampers AP efficiency, not to mention introduce fraud risk. What’s worse, these outdated operations prevent your AP team from adding more value and more revenue to the organization. Too much of your team’s time is tied up in manual, error-prone tasks instead of initiatives that drive the business forward.
Challenge #2: Payment Fraud
Your AP team faces a host of challenges to realizing the function’s full potential. And payment fraud is potentially one of the costliest challenges of all.
Your AP department is exceptionally vulnerable to fraud—in fact, 90% of companies view AP as their organization’s most significant fraud risk.*
Scammers send emails, submit fake invoices, and request to update bank account information in hopes of rerouting or receiving fraudulent payments. Too often, AP teams don’t know they’ve paid fraudsters until the real supplier asks about a past due invoice.
*Source: Strategic Treasurer: Treasury Fraud and Controls Survey 2019
AP teams know there are security risks that need to be handled .
50% of people in corporate roles
reported seeing an increase in fraud attempts over a three-year period
54% of North American businesses
have internal monitoring for fraud attempts
74% of large and 55% of small organization
have multifactor authentication for business payments
Source: 2020 Treasury Fraud and Controls Survey Report
The challenges are there, but if you’ve read this far, you’re likely motivated to evangelize change.
By improving your AP operations, you can mitigate fraud and improve your team’s productivity.
1) Prioritize automation
Finding ways to automate invoice and payment processes is the first step toward improving and elevating your AP operations.
2) Reduce fraud risk
Automation and security go hand-in-hand when both are done well.
3) Generate significant revenue
The net impact is the transformation of AP from a cost center into a revenue generator, increasing value to the larger business.
FIRST OPPORTUNITY
Prioritize automation
Finding ways to automate invoice and payment processes is the first step toward improving and elevating your AP operations. Reducing paper and manual tasks increases efficiency, reduces errors, provides more data about your payments, increases payment speed, and opens up space for AP to focus on higher-level objectives.
Automated AP teams report that their solutions:
Eliminate paper invoices and manual processes
Reduce costs, errors, and risks
Integrate seamlessly with your ERP
Improve visibility and control
Maximize straight-through processing
SECOND OPPORTUNITY
Reduce fraud risk
Automation and security go hand-in-hand when both are done well. The right software partner provides efficiencies and data to be sure. However, automating processes also provides the chance to limit the risk of fraud.
Automation technology provides additional built-in controls and helps improve your security efforts.
For instance, thanks to advanced pattern recognition capabilities, you can employ risk scoring, which uses custom business rules plus supervised machine learning to help identify unusual and potentially fraudulent invoices and evaluate the security of each payment before you make it. As an added bonus, these technologies can make your vendor onboarding effort both more secure and more efficient.
THIRD OPPORTUNITY
Discover true efficiency
Automation frees AP staff from the chore of manual work, which opens up the opportunity to explore early payment discounts and rebates.
The net impact is the transformation of AP from a cost center into a revenue generator, increasing value to the larger business.
Take advantage of discounts
Automated payments make it easier to track and time all of your vendor payments and take advantage of available early payment discounts. The small savings collated over multiple suppliers and months adds up and makes a significant difference.
Earn rebates on AP spend
By leveraging electronic payments, including virtual card and Automated Clearing House (ACH), you can give your company’s topline an easy and significant boost. Take the time to explore the best rebate program for your company, set up ACH and card payments with vendors, and then watch the rewards roll in over time.
AP doesn’t have to remain underappreciated and undervalued just because that’s the way it’s always been. Focus on the areas that challenge your AP team and leverage automation solutions to reduce your payment fraud risk and increase your productivity, cost savings, revenue, and more.
Limit AP fraud attempts and damages
Enhance data, analytics and business intelligence
Improve supplier relationships
Eliminate paper processes, invoices and checks
Save money on discounts and earn on rebates
Allow your team to focus on strategic tasks
video time: 02:50video title: Automate Your AP Processes
See for yourself how easy it is to drive greater value from your Accouts Payable operations in this three minute video.
According to the Global Payments Report, 20% of AP teams have zero automation in their processes. Stay ahead of the curve and discover how Paymode-X AP Automation is here to help your business.
Are you ready to reinvent your AP department and achieve best-in-class performance?
Download our infographic to find out how Paymode-X can help you transform your AP function.
Transform AP with Paymode-X: 6 Benefits for Your Business
