ePayables

This is something that was made very clear in Ardent Partners’ recent study (ePayables 2012: The State of the AP Market). As a function, AP can add a whole lot more value than data entry and responding to supplier inquires. There is an opportunity for AP to work closely with treasury and finance to develop [...]

Most people know Concur as a leading provider of travel and expense management solutions. However, for some time now, they have been offering a solution that allows clients to manage inbound invoices and pay them. The offering includes eInvoicing capabilities, scan and capture services, a self-service supplier portal and payment processing and execution. Now, all [...]

Following the most recent addition to the Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BAML) ePayables offering, I had a chance to have a chat with Samridhi Sarin, Director, Senior Product Manager of ePayables at BAML. The announcement was the launch of a new feature called exact auth override. This feature, which may sound technical and complicated, [...]

Introducing PAYVE®, a new digital payment service from American Express Earlier this year, I wrote a report that predicted the top ten things that will shape the AP market in 2012 and yes, you guessed it, one of the predictions was that 2012 has a very good chance of becoming ‘The Year of Electronic Payments” [...]

This can be a noisy and complicated market to understand, so at Ardent we created this visual representation which is based on our ePayables Framework that is discussed here in more detail.  Using the three major phases of the AP process as the basis for the categorization, solution providers fall within or across the phases [...]

The results of Best-in-Class organizations show that an investment in Procure-to-Pay (P2P) can pay large dividends, while the relentless pressure on bottom-line performance makes a P2P investment all, but necessary, for most groups. Yet, the speed and level of returns from a P2P initiative can and do vary widely. Competing short-term initiatives from distinct organizations [...]

According to the US Small Business Administration, in 2009 (the latest available data) there were about 27.5 million small businesses in the U.S, approximately 6 million of which have employees with the remainder being sole proprietorships. It is safe to assume that a significant chunk of small to mid-sized businesses (SMB’s) suffer from highly manual [...]

Last month, Ardent Partners completed its annual AP focused market research report – ePayables 2012: The State of The AP Market. This extensive piece of research, which took up most of my time over the last few months uses data gathered from approximately 220 organizations and captures the strategies, performance and intentions of AP departments [...]

The strategic value of AP & Dynamic Discounting in creating high yield, low risk investment opportunities. In today’s global economy the enterprise faces multiple areas of financial concern, from the Eurozone crisis to slow economic growth and tight credit markets. This makes the job of the corporate treasury a difficult one. Some of their top [...]

As this is the first article after yesterday’s launch, I thought it best to start off by providing our view of the accounts payable world. At Ardent, we use the term ePayables to describe the various solutions and services that automate all or part of the AP process and in case you were wondering, yes, [...]