Best Practices

I have the pleasure of welcoming a “Payables Guest” today, Lynn Heitman, Senior Product and Marketing Officer, U.S. Bank Corporate Payment Systems. Heitman’s career in the payments industry spans 24 years beginning with the management of some of the first Affinity credit card programs in the 1980s and since then has worked in several areas of [...]

In order to continue to provide valuable and insightful content, we decided this year to include articles from other experts in the field on occasion. Today, we have an article from our first “Payables Guest” – Mark Becker, Program Optimization Manager at U.S. Bank Corporate Payment Systems. Most organizations have specific reasons for starting purchasing [...]

Today’s article is a brief snippet of a report that Ardent Partners completed for Concur entitled –The SMB of the Future: Start Fast, Then Accelerate For an entire generation, technology has had an extraordinary impact on the lives of countless millions in the home and office. At home, technology and access to the internet have [...]

It was not so long ago that a trip to the grocery store could be ruined by a single action: having the person at the front of the checkout line decide to pay by check (a decision that was seemingly always made at the last second). From an uncertainty in knowing current account balances, to [...]

As we think about the entire ePayables Framework (i.e., Receive, Process and Pay), it is during the “Pay” phase of the process that AP can work closely with treasury and finance to develop more sophisticated payment strategies and implement processes to optimize working capital (however, it should be noted that the efficiency and accuracy of [...]

For an accounts payable department, efficiency, effectiveness, and accuracy are key to its function and responsibilities within the enterprise. An AP department that lacks these attributes may result in suppliers not getting paid on time, errors within invoices and payments and overall delays in the procure-to-pay process. Establishing and measuring relevant metrics is an important [...]

Those of you who have already gone through this process know very well the challenges that arise when building a business case and trying to get approval for a project, during the selection process and after deployment of a solution. The solution selection process has multiple steps that can be difficult and lengthy and it [...]

The Request for Proposal (RFP) process can be a lengthy and tedious process and if not executed well, can result in serious consequences for the project at hand and its validity.  In most cases, an RFP will be issued once a project has been given the go-ahead by senior management and once a plan has [...]

In my effort to cover AP (and P2P) processes, strategies and technologies one of the first projects at Ardent was to create the ePayables SMARTset. The purpose being, to help guide organizations through the process of improving performance within AP and surprise surprise, it all starts by being able to present a solid business case [...]