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The Accounts Payable Automation – Where is the value?
Controllers rank accounts payable as the most time-consuming, laborious, and paper-intensive finance and administration function, ahead of activities such as accounts receivable, payroll, tax, and audit and reporting, according to IOFM’s 2016 Accounts Payable Key Performance Indicators Study.
As shown in the following table, these are general phases which every invoice has to go through. Each phase is people based, paper intensive and time consuming activities.
| Process | Description of activities |
|---|---|
| Invoice receipt | Vendors generate the customer Invoice through their ERP system. Inovice is printed and sent to the customers for invoice processing and payment. In this process, Vendors have no control over the invoice receipt by customer. This process is people based, inefficient and chances of missing invoices, late payments. |
| Routing to right person | Invoice has to be routed to right person for approvals by one or more prior to payments. This manual process of finding right person, follow-up for any delays from approvers is difficult and becomes even more difficult in the event of any invoice dispute. There is no visibility or control available in invoice processing. |
| Invoice 3 Way Matching | PO based invoice needs to be matched with Purchase Order and Goods receipts prior to accepting the invoice. This manual process is cumbersome and time consuming, involves various teams within the company for resolving any issues like Qty mismatch, Price mismatch, items not received, etc. |
| Exception handling | Invoices are processed for each exceptions such as Wrong PO, incorrect tax applied, Vendor data mismatch, 3-Way matching failed, incorrect cost centers. Different stakeholders are involved in resolving the exceptions, routing and tracking becomes difficult, as the process is people dependent. |
| Invoice Payment | Consolidate all supplier payments after all exceptions and approvals are completed. The payment is processed by ERP and payment is made through either cheque payment or clearinghouse. |
| Duplicate Invoice | Duplicate invoice payments occurs regularly. Most of the times this goes unnoticed. Detecting duplicate invoice requires expensive and intensive manual processes. Many are never noticed or resolved. |
Once we understand the processes involved, it should be easy to see why the financial controllers rank the accounts payable as most time consuming and paper intensive. If we acknowledge the people dependent, paper intensive and inefficiencies of manual process-, why so many companies are still using manually processing vendor invoices?
What values customers are looking from Accounts Payable Automation?
- Improved Visibility into Invoices received, Invoice ready for payment, Invoices in exceptions for better cash flow and cash management
- Reduce cost of Invoice processing
- Improve AP team productivity
- Improve volume of Invoices processed Straight-through
Intertec’s Accounts Payable Automation Solution – delivering the value
Integrates directly with your ERP application to streamline the arrival to and handling of your invoice documents while providing a full visibility from invoice receipt to payment status
- 100 % VISIBILITY AND CONTROL OF INVOICE LIFE CYCLE: Oversee the entire invoice life cycle and payment status with 100% visibility and control. Since the entire AP process is electronic and 100% visible from start to finish, it is much easier to plan and forecast as well as identify areas of improvement in the process
- 25 TO 60% HEADCOUNT REDUCTION
- AUTOMATIC ROUTING OF INVOICE ON EXCEPTIONS : Configurable exception queues, specifically designed to route invoice exceptions to concerned team/person based strictly on your business rules
- AUTOMATED 3-WAY MATCH: Automatic 3-Way match verification based on PO data, delivery challan and receipt data.
- AUTOMATED ROUTING OF NON-PO INVOICES: workflow based automatic routing for approval based on GL/cost center or user defined business rules
- SELF- SERVICE FOR VENDOR on Invoice submission, payment status and for query handling
