Explore what can go wrong in this process and how thoughtful automation can help your company to navigate these waters
Accounts payable is one of those components of a business that is crucial to smooth operations but can also become messy very quickly. In this article, we’ll explore how this happens and how thoughtful automation can help your company to navigate these waters.
A company’s accounts payable refers to the amount the money that a business owes to its suppliers and vendors, but has not paid yet. So, the accounts payable process lays out all the steps that it takes from placing the order, to the final payment of the invoice. These short-term payment obligations can grow in complexity quickly, and so having a well-defined and well-understood process helps to maintain high standards and ensure that all payments are being made on time, and in line with strategic objectives.
There are three major types of documents that play vital roles in the accounts payable process:
Each of these documents plays an important role along the process and your systems need to be set up to handle them at scale if you want to maintain a robust and efficient workflow.
Having an efficient accounts payable process is crucial for cash flow and general operations but there are a number of common challenges that CFOs and finance managers face as they try to build the right workflows in their organization. Some of these include the following:
These are just some of the challenges within accounts payable that many companies face – and if you can take steps to streamline your process and automate where possible, it will reduce accounts payable discrepancies, shorten cycle times, and boost overall satisfaction across the process.
Here are some key considerations for streamlining your accounts payable process:
By implementing any of these actions, you’ll find that your accounts payable can see drastic improvements which, in turn, has positive effects across vital parts of the organization.
We have many enterprise clients who use Send AI to boost their accounts payable automation and to build an end-to-end workflow that prioritizes efficiency and accuracy. This reduces the manual workload and minimizes the chance of costly errors from your staff.
Our platform can receive documents from a myriad of different sources (emails, scans, PDFs, and more) and extract the key data to be fed into the rest of your business systems. This is done through machine learning models that can deliver accuracy scores of 98-99% which far outperforms general invoice parsers/tools which are not trained on your specific data. Send AI is a dedicated solution rather than a one-size-fits-some solution.
The data extraction can be done at very specific levels of detail – which is crucial for certain sectors that work with complex documentation. And this data can then be integrated with ERP and other accounting tools through an API. For the companies that are stuck with legacy systems – we can also work with your RPA team (or a consultant of our own) to establish the necessary connection between Send AI and what you currently use.
Custom cross-checks and other validation (including three-way matching) come standard – with key warnings about when a user is about to process a high amount, there is missing information or other things like that. Everything is taken care of to produce a highly efficient and functional accounts payable process.