Keeping track of your Accounts Payable without automation is an effort wasted! Nowadays, too much time and energy go into chasing problems. What if you could solve a problem before it even arises? Automating your Accounts Payable process helps solve the puzzle.
The problem: too many flows to keep track of
When it comes to Accounts Payable, it’s a matter of waiting and racing. Upon receiving the needed data from your received invoices, it’s time to enter the information into your system, match it with existing data, and authorize the routing. From this point on, you should be all set. Unless you’ve made a mistake in doing it all by hand. In that case, the hunt for the error begins. You have to do it all again. Imagine the time it takes to do so for each and every workflow, project, or vendor. Or worse, what if you miss the error altogether?
Looking for where the mistake was made can be tricky. Especially because some mistakes arise at one step of the process while their cause lies elsewhere. Nick Leirs, Teamlead CoE Business Processes, explains: ‘Chasing problems remains a big issue within organizations. People from all departments have to come together and account for their pieces of the puzzle. We are here to bring the puzzle together most efficiently.’
The solution: automation
Putting the loose data and workflows into one clear picture requires some effort. Automation is here to help. Process Director for Accounts Payable starts with an OCR solution. This is to capture the necessary data from an invoice. This can be done in the cloud by using the smart OCR Solution, Tungsten AP Essentials, which is a smart OCR solution with self-learning capabilities. That means once you’ve processed an invoice, the software knows which information to capture to use for future invoices.
After finishing the OCR process, the invoice data and image will be transferred to the Process Director, which resides in your SAP system(s). PO-based invoices are automatically matched two- or three-way against the Purchase Order and/or Goods Receipt. Possible deviations are automatically sent to the budget holder for approval. Non-PO-based invoices are coded and sent through a workflow for authorization.
Winning compliance
Using the AP module streamlines your operations and maintains, if not improves, the accuracy of your transactions. When the management of your invoices and payments runs smoothly, your vendor relationships will flourish too. Thanks to realtime updates and automatic matching, you will never miss an error again.
Nick Leirs also stresses the important role of AP in the e-invoicing transition. Thanks to automation, the data from your invoices will create a structured overview message which can be sent into the next system for processing.
In short, using the Accounts Payable module allows for:
- Streamlining and optimizing your invoicing process
- Integrating data
- Visualizing that data
- Improving vendor relationships
- Upping compliance with regulations
Are you interested in learning more about our AP module? Watch our demo!
This is part 4 of our blog-series about Process Director. You can read part 1 about Purchase Requisition here, part 2 about Order Confirmations here, and part 3 about Delivery Notes here.
