Five Accounts Payable Mistakes to Avoid

Data extraction from invoices, remittances, and related documents is challenging and expensive for every organization. Your organization might have leaped into the accounts payable automation but committed some mistakes. Understand how you can avoid those mistakes and what are those challenging blocks in the path of success. 

 

Avoid accounts payable mistakes during automation.

Check out our tips below for ensuring success in your accounts payable automation initiatives.

1. Not getting stakeholders on board.

The key stakeholders should be kept in the account’s automation plan and the pros and cons in the nascent stage. They should be aware of the change it brings and also how it affects the current workforce. Their support and trust are essential to make a smooth transition and successful business objective. Conduct multiple discussions with stakeholders about the rollout schedule and gain valuable insights to save time and cost.  Make the stakeholders feel they are a part of the initiative.

2. Missing to create a list of essential must-haves

Be sure of the exact benefits of accounts payable automation and the value it delivers. This step is essential to choose software to solve the operational issues rather than struggling with them later. Check the versatility and scalability option of the software during the vendor demo sessions. Question them about various real-time scenarios of your organization and how the software works with invoices and automation workflows. Get in-depth details about the ‘As-is’ and ‘To-be’ process flows about each process and how the accounts payable and invoice processing gets handled through automation.

Check demonstration of the software carefully and about the versatility of the product. Ensure that the software design will solve the company’s specific problems. Note down a few must-have features required in the software for your business.

3. Not Calculating current cost and time of processes.

Calculate the cost and time efficiency of the software during the automation process than while doing manual data processing. Try to figure out the value; else, you may not have a sense of cost and time efficiency to invest in AP automation. This analyzing process is time-consuming, and due diligence is crucial to avoid any later complication of adopting automated accounts payable.

Cross-check the time and cost-efficiency of the product and apply it to your company’s finance systems.

For example, you may be spending 8 hours a week checking invoice availability from various portals and trying to download them. Instead, if you use GetMyInvoices invoice automation, the application automatically downloads invoices from all web portals. This can save 8 hours of weekly effort.  GetMyInvoices application recognizes invoices in emails and imports them automatically into the central document management location. GetMyInvoices uses customized intelligent workflows to save time in processing invoices. You can explore more about GetMyInvoices.

4. Forgetting software integration to your current enterprise software apps

The present enterprise software applications should be able to integrate with an automation process. The new software may not efficiently switch data between accounting and ERP software as claimed by the vendor. As a result, the automation system may turn inefficient, resulting in more problems than providing an automated solution.

Ensure to test Accounts Payable software with real-time invoices to understand and process with your current enterprise system. During the testing phase, ensure the speed and accuracy of invoice upload and retrieval from the system into your ERP system or tax accountants’ system is smooth, fast, and accurate.

GetMyInvoices is a cloud-based SaaS application and seamlessly integrates with ERP applications and other financial applications. You can easily sync GetMyInvoices with your company’s systems to send and receive the required invoice and other data.

5. Not aligning on future roadmaps.

Consider and study all the benefits and features of the automated software before integrating it into the current enterprise system. Collect feedback from earlier customers of the automation software and check the vendor’s ability to deliver quality products and services. Ensure future vendor roadmap aligns with your business objective and automation needs. The roadmap and scalability offer an insight to innovate and stay ahead in the industry to serve a large customer base.

Good luck with automation and do avoid accounts payable mistakes as above.
GetMyInvoices is a future-ready application and easily integrates with multiple applications and portals.

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