7 Reasons to Automate your Accounts Payable Processes

While how you work might be quickly innovating, a lot of processes – especially when it comes to accounts – still rely on manual and traditionally slow and cumbersome ERP solutions and paper-based processes. Through automating your accounts payable process, you can streamline how you work and unlock true benefits that come from digitalisation.

Optimising your accounts payable process is more than simply utilising automation. You also benefit with other factors that not only improve your day-to-day work worries, but also improve productivity and management of your staff, vendors and suppliers.

Here are 7 reasons to automate your procure-to-pay process today!

1. Minimise Human Error

With manual data entry comes the risk of human error which could result in miscalculations and mistakes. Through utilising intelligent procure-to-pay software and automation, organisations have seen fewer errors caused by manual input and less duplication of effort. More so, software utilising intelligent data capture to enhance the process allows for more intuitive extraction of data and standardised processes to enforce internal controls and compliance.

2. Enhance Data & Fraud Prevention

Ensure your organisation is protected at every step of the workflow, every day. Mitigate your risks with, ABN matching, audit trails, multi-level authorisation, spend to budget comparisons, multi-factor authentication, bank level security, data encryption & restricted access rights by department. It is reported that 1 in 7 organisations have been impacted by invoice fraud and by implementing smart accounts payable software that integrates directly with your accounting software, will allow your team to work and be rest assured knowing they are protected.

3. Foster Better Supplier Relationships

Digitising your accounts payable process not only benefit your business but also your suppliers. Through implementing enhanced software, you can create and keep better supplier relationships with less paperwork, shorter processing times and faster payment timelines, all with an integrated digital paper trail.

4. Gain Real-time Insights

Allowing your team to access performance dashboards as a benefit to digitising the accounts payable process allows them to view the data relevant to the processes and assist users in identifying bottlenecks. Real-time insights also allow your team to identify purchase orders and invoices that have been delayed in the process, and drill into the user to identify the exact purchase order or invoice that is causing the delay.

5. Reduce Operational Costs

Process automation covering all stages of the procure-to-pay function allows for organisations to not only gain real-time insights, but also reduce operational spending. As reported in the PwC Finance Effectiveness Benchmark Report , implementing process automation can reduce operations time and costs by up to 46%, and allow for finance, operations and management teams to adopt more effective, lean working techniques.

6. Improve Productivity

Like reducing operational costs, automating the procure-to-pay process allows your team to step away from monotonous tasks and focus more important action items. Routine transactional work such as gathering, reconciling, validating, compiling and circulating data can all be automated and allow your team to focus on higher level business operations. Reducing the manual and time-consuming tasks involved with paper-based processes not only allows for improved productivity, but also increases staff satisfaction levels.

7. Increase Employee Satisfaction

Keep your team in the loop through every step of their request. By allowing your staff to complete their procurement requests all through a user-friendly web-form, they can be in more control of their requests and be satisfied with increased accuracy. Predefined workflows also mean less manual handling and less human intervention for your accounts team, keeping everyone happy!

Want to learn how Alii can accelerate the digital transformation of your accounts payable functions? Learn more about the first of its kind, cloud-based features designed to digitise, protect, streamline and simplify accounts payable functions.