It is with great pleasure that Ardent Partners announces the publication of its latest state of accounts payable (“AP”) research report—“ePayables 2015: Higher Ground.” Like the annual reports that came before it, the 2015 ePayables report focuses on the state of the AP function as well as assessing how AP teams leverage ePayables solutions to improve business results and offering up Best-in-Class metrics that allow readers to benchmark their own operations against top performers. (The report is available for download here, here, here, and here.)
AP’s Two-Year Goals – Automate More AP Processes
The AP team occupies a unique position in the enterprise at large. No matter where an approved purchase is made—whether the line of business, procurement, or elsewhere in the organization—if an invoice is generated, then that invoice and the resulting payment must be approved in the AP workflow. Because of this, AP has the potential to become a centralized “hub” of financial insights and intelligence for the wider organization. AP likely already collects all the information other departments need to augment their capabilities, such as Treasury with supplier payment data, but the issue is that manual processes limit the visibility required to actually share this data.
It is only through automating the AP process that much of AP’s data can be shared. Couple this with the reality that automation shortens the time it takes to approve an invoice, and it is little surprise that 53% of respondents to Ardent’s ePayables 2015 survey listed automating more AP processes as a goal for the next two years. This makes increasing the levels of automation the top goal for the next 24 months, which makes sense given the central role that technology can play in making the difference between an efficient and inefficient AP workflow.
Automating more of the AP workflow allows the process to scale; no matter how fast a person is at validating invoices, there is only so many invoices that one AP team member can do quickly and accurately. An automated solution, on the other hand, can process many more invoices than a single person can in the same time frame, and has the added capability of allowing the AP team to focus on tasks that add strategic value to the organization at large.
Final Thoughts
Automating more processes has a cumulative effect on the AP team; more automation of core processes like data entry and invoice verification opens up more staff time to work on tasks of strategic importance. These include a greater influence in cash management through supplier payment data, and providing financial intelligence to internal stakeholders for better business decisions. These and other benefits inherent in automation make it little wonder that automating more AP processes is the top goal for the next two years.
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