Four Steps to Successfully Streamline Your Accounting Office
Accounts Payable (AP) departments play a critical role in a business’s success as they oversee the company’s financial responsibilities and provide support in many areas.
Strained vendor relationships, late payments, errors, and fraudulent attacks are all examples of how fragmented business processes can negatively impact your bottom line and potentially cause your company to fail. To create a successful and effective department, you must streamline processes. Here are four ways you can streamline your accounting office to ensure success:
- Simplify workflows:
One of the first major steps in streamlining your accounting office is simplifying AP workflows, which starts with delegating steps of the workflow process to various members of your finance team. For departments still using manual, paper-based processing, finding a proper way to divide tasks – from creating a purchase order to approving invoices – between staff members can be difficult. This becomes an even greater challenge if a department suffers from severe staffing shortages and heavy turnover.
Without proper workflow management, finance departments risk increased processing costs, delayed payments, duplicate payments, wasted time, and more. Implementing a best-in-class AP Automation solution makes it easy to simplify workflows as it creates digital layers of approval, paperless document management, and role-based controls.
2. Reduce manual tasks
AP practitioners waste around 84% of their day on manual tasks1 that could be automated, like keying invoice data, chasing down invoice approvals, correcting errors, and responding to calls and emails about the status of payments. These duties are arduous and time-consuming, often causing employees to feel overworked and burnt out.
Paymerang’s best-in-class Invoice and Payment Automation solutions streamline the accounting process from start to finish, eliminating the manual tasks that bog AP departments down. For example, Paymerang’s Invoice Automation enables AP departments to process invoices 6x faster than manual processing. Paymerang’s powerful Payment Automation software also allows teams to save 80% of time on payment processing.
Finance departments already implementing automation have more time to focus on strategic initiatives and other goals. Additionally, they lower their risk of fraud, human error, and decrease processing costs. These benefits make it quick and easy to streamline your finance department.
3. Review data
Like manual AP processing, attempting to review and manage data without automated processes can be demanding. Financial reports are the lifeline of any business, but AP department must stop manually producing them. Creating, reviewing, and managing data is error-prone, detracts from data analytics, and takes up too much of your company’s time and resources2.
AP Automation is the quickest way to gain visibility into your company’s finances. Paymerang’s Payment Automation software provides on-demand reporting capabilities to users, giving them more transparency through self-service reporting. This includes a payment history report, archived documents, and a payment status report. Having access to such data allows CFOs, financial controllers, and other key members of your finance team to make informed decisions, solve problems, understand performance, and improve processes3. Also, Invoice Automation software is proven more accurate and reduces errors with coding and invoice exceptions by 80%.
4. Improve supplier relationships
AP practitioners have an infinite list of responsibilities, but perhaps one of the most vital one is ensuring a great relationship with vendors. Delayed payments, often resulting from manual, paper-based accounting processing, cause strained relationships with vendors while also causing businesses to lose out on perks. For example, 59% of suppliers that had been paid late reduced or halted discounts, and 62% withheld goods or services that were ordered until invoices were paid4.
Another challenge impacting AP departments is severe staffing shortages and heavy turnover, making it difficult to have the time to improve relationships with your suppliers. Paymerang provides white-glove service and handles the reconciliation process from start to finish, ensuring that you are in good standing with all your vendors.
Successful AP departments must streamline processes. Combining these four tips helps organizations achieve greater efficiency and provide additional benefits, including increased cost efficiency, improved productivity, improved communication, better time management, and minimizing risk5.
Implementing Paymerang takes 10 hours or less and seamlessly integrates with various ERPs. To streamline your accounting office, click here to schedule a demo.
Sources:
1The Institute of Finance & Management: How End-to-End AP Automation Drives Efficiency and Business Growth
2Entrepreneur: 3 Reasons to Stop Creating Financial Reports Manually (and 3 Things to Do Instead)
3GROW: Why is data important for your business?
4PYMTS
5Indeed: 6 Ways to Streamline Business Processes and Workflows
