Most businesses use Microsoft Excel as a tracking tool to check and manage their finances and for monitoring financial activities.
However, MS-Excel has its own set of drawbacks. Not only can it be arduous to track activities for those professionals who need hands-on experience or more knowledge. Also, MS-Excel being a manual tool leaves room for errors and limits thorough analysis as well. Nor it offers any integration with the ERP system. Moreover, users may need help keeping all the formulas and formatting in mind.
This blog showcases how to identify the need for an AP (accounts payable) automation tool in your organization.
Compromising with Productive Time
If your AP team creates invoices all day long, there must be something wrong in your business process that needs attention. When an invoice is processed manually, there’s a higher probability of errors than in paper-based records. Moreover, they are susceptible to getting lost or crumpled. Besides, teams have to compromise their productivity while searching for hard copies of invoices and payment receipts instead of producing quarterly or monthly reports.
Delayed Payments and Missing Deadlines
Is your AP team juggling through the lengthy vendor payments cycle? Are your partners waiting for their payment approvals for months? If that’s the case, your vendor partners are crying out for help, and the organization is at risk of losing its partner’s confidence. In addition, such tedious and delaying manual processes can strain vendor relationships in the long run.
More Error and Less Transparency
The manual invoice processes are prone to errors that may result in an inaccurate number, duplicate payments, missing invoices, or any missed credit entries. It becomes almost like finding a needle in a haystack when pinpointing errors because manual entries are not automatically time- or name-stamped. Further, there’s no transparency regarding invoice approval and payment release status.
Less Productive Team
Do you notice new faces in your finance team every month? That’s possible because people are tired of doing monotonous jobs and are looking out for something productive and promising. Instead of mundane tasks, AP technology could help finance teams make data-driven decisions by analyzing business spend data.
Be Future-Ready
Do you still watch movies on a CD player or listen to music on iPod? When our simple means of entertainment have changed to digital, why are our financial records still maintained on hard copies? It is noticed that when the financial accounts are being maintained physically, it is bound to get damaged or tampered. This may lead to a severe loss of information to the organization. Therefore, instead of saving several photocopies or storing them in large file cabinets, keeping the records data is always worthwhile.
How to Fix the Problems in Your AP Team
Productive investment of AP automation to bridge the gap between vendors & the finance team leads to excellent customer service too.
Referring to a report AP report, here are a few statistics that will compel you to invest in AP automation for future growth & profitability.
- 64% of companies experienced an uptick in invoice processing with AP automation, keeping the same team size
- More than half of the top-notch companies adopt AP automation to boost sales and productivity
- 45% of businesses prefer payments via check for their suppliers.
- More than half of AP automation users reported a significant impact on payment controls, vendor onboarding, and fraud protection
- 6 out of 10 businesses that generate reports through automation technology noticed improved access to procurement analytics
If you see your finance team is in crisis mode, please act immediately. Don’t ignore such early signs, and address these challenges sooner than later.
Gift your AP staff the need of the hour, i.e., automation technology, and resolve their pains and challenges instantly- Aavenir Invoiceflow.
