Change can undoubtedly be scary, more so when dealing with business processes that have been done the same way for years. This is an issue that you’ll experience as a business owner on the fence about whether to switch from the traditional accounting processes to automating some accounting processes. You’re bound to experience such a conflict when considering whether accounts payable automation is best suited for your business (go to Coupa’s webpage to check their AP automation tool).
This is why different businesses are quickly embracing accounts payable automation, as it helps optimize all the financial transactions from approving processes. In this blog post from Ash Conversions International Word, you’ll be taken through why automating your accounts payable will pay off in the long run.
1. Cut Down Cost
One of your primary goals as an entrepreneur is to cut down operational costs to increase your profit margin. The automation of accounts payable allows you to achieve exactly this since it helps cut down labor costs. This is because fewer manual tasks need to be done, from data entry, scanning documents, downloading attachments, manually coding invoice details, and searching for misplaced invoices. Automating the accounts payable allows you to do away with such duties, hence cut down the overall labor cost by around 83%.
2. Saves Time
Streamlining business operations with a p automation should be your goal as a business owner as it boosts the overall productivity of everyone within the organization. Automating the accounts payable allows you to do this as it hastens the speed at which invoices are processed. This is because accounts payable software cuts down the time that would have otherwise been spent looking for an invoice.
An automated routing does away with the delays usually experienced during traditional accounting methods, thereby streamlining the approval process. It does this by ensuring your employees get the invoice at an appropriate time, thanks to the programmable reminders. In addition, it features real-time and high-level invoice processing, which cuts down the time spent to determine an invoice’s status.
3. Mitigate Accounting Risks
Manual data entry, calculations, and several kinds of communication across the different departments increase the likelihood of making a mistake. This includes misplacing documents, misfiling, processing errors, or making incorrect payments. It becomes especially difficult to detect and eliminate such accounting errors. Making such costly accounting mistakes can cost your company as it lowers the quality of service and tarnishes its reputation.
Having an automatic accounts payable system ensures such errors never happen as you get to identify discrepancies immediately. This is possible as automatic accounts payable ensures accurate bookkeeping, two or three-way matching to confirm data across the board, and offers dependable routing. It also promotes unhindered communication across the different departments within the organization by offering digital permission to files to the different parties. As a result, the productivity of everyone within the organization is enhanced.
4. Improved Transparency
For everyone within the company to make proper decisions, they need to have complete visibility to purchase orders, payments, and invoices visibility. By automating the accounts payable, you’ll get to attain this to make sure everyone within the company has access to vital information. Thanks to this greater visibility, they can make informed decisions faster, thanks to the established clear communication channel that betters the whole process.
