The AP Automation Readiness Checklist

Did you know businesses automating their invoice-to-payment process achieve up to an 80% reduction in processing costs and speed up processing time by 74%?

Organizations automating AP realize tremendous value that extends into enhancing cash management, reducing errors, earning cash-back rebates, and improving visibility, reporting, and fraud prevention. But is your organization ready?

This quick checklist will help you assess your organization's need and readiness in several areas of AP, including:

• Invoice receipt and processing
• B2B payments
• Reporting and analytics

And more. Answer these questions to quickly and easily determine if it's time for your organization to automate AP.

• Paper invoices being received from vendors
• Paper invoices being sent to multiple office locations
• Invoices being manually keyed into our systems
• Invoices received electronically are being printed out
• No portal available for suppliers to submit invoices and check payment status

• Difficulty measuring key AP metrics
• Lack of visibility into unrecorded liabilities
• Limited insight into the entire procure-to-pay process
• Unable to view all AP data in one place
• No role-based reporting dashboards or ad-hoc reporting

• Average invoice takes more than 3 days to receive and process
• No way to ensure invoices are coded properly
• Difficulty matching invoices to purchase orders (POs)
• Exception handling is manual and time-consuming
• Unable to achieve ‘touchless’ processing of invoices

• Average cost to process an invoice is more than $2.50 or is “unknown”
• Difficulty integrating with back-end ERP systems
• Lack of financial controls in AP processes
• Relying on paper and manual tasks for AP processes
• Have been a victim of a payment fraud attempt

• Majority of payments are made with paper checks
• Missing out on early payment discounts • Consistently incurring late payment penalties
• Not maximizing cashback rebates on AP spend
• Remittance data processing is manual
• Authenticate vendors and hold their sensitive financial information

Now what?

How many boxes did you check? If you’re like many organizations we talk to, your answer is probably most or even all of them. Here’s the upshot: If you checked more than 4 boxes, you are ready for AP Automation! The simple truth is that almost everyone who’s taken this little quiz has checked many boxes, so you are not alone.

The 7 phases from the AP Automation Buyers' Guide

Now that you have evaluated your “Current State” with this phase 1 checklist, you are now ready to proceed to the “Team & Goals” phase 2. This little treasure map from the Buyers’ Guide to AP Automation will help you navigate what can be a complex buying cycle to reach your end state of a smart, efficient, and well-run AP operation. Just click below and your journey awaits!