Ardent Partners recently published our annual ePayables report, “ePayables 2014: The Quest,” and, like all of our payables reports this year, the research is geared toward AP leaders, financial managers, executives, and those who aspire to these roles. The report presents a comprehensive overview of the state of accounts payable, as well as focusing on ePayables technology and systems in addition to providing a way for accounts payable teams to benchmark themselves against the Best-in-Class and improve their overall performance.
We spoke with over 190 accounts payable, finance, and other professionals across 25 different industries to give our readers a complete picture of the state of the market. The report is available for free (registration required) at four report sponsor sites: Ariba, Taulia, Basware, and Tradeshift.
Two AP Success Strategies You Need to Implement Right Now
Technology is only part of the formula for running a successful accounts payable operation. Should you be lucky enough to purchase an eInvoicing solution or transition entirely over to ePayments, you won’t gain all the efficiencies or cost-savings possible if you don’t include the strategic processes that function behind the new tools. To help you reach that end-goal of a mostly automated AP workflow that consists of touchless, or straight-through, processing, here are two strategies that must be implemented right away.
Strategy 1: Develop Regular and Proactive Supplier Communication Plans
Far and away, a lack of supplier buy-in is the biggest stumbling block to true AP automation. Lack of buy-in can be surmounted, however, if you communicate regularly with all your suppliers and vendors. The good news is that this communication doesn’t have to be manual; many eInvoicing solutions, and business networks, make information readily available so suppliers don’t have to pick up the phone or send an email. These solution providers often have teams that tackle the challenge of supplier enablement for you.
Companies of all sizes—from the Fortune 50 on down—have grown more and more reliant on their suppliers and vendors to thrive. It’s because of this trend that communicating with and engaging your suppliers is critical to your AP/finance team’s success. Communicating well with your suppliers in the arena of invoicing and payments, incidentally, also translates to an improved relationship with your company’s procurement team and treasury department. Communication, in essence, is the lynchpin to a cost-effective and streamlined process.
Strategy 2: Consider Outsourcing Low Value, Tactical Activities
The vast majority of current AP staff time is spent on tactical, low-value activities that consume significant staff resources. By low-value, we’re talking about things like data entry or scanning paper invoices into your system. Let’s be honest—scan-and-capture isn’t your AP team’s core competency. Neither is data entry, for that matter, or manual checking against invoices.
No, where your AP team really needs to spend the bulk of their time is on process exceptions and other value-add activities. Specifically, making sure exceptions are managed properly and eventually reduced. Some other critical activities could include data enhancements for procurement or treasury, or even improving straight-through processing capabilities.
There are many business-process outsourcing (BPO) companies who focus on performing the manual tasks that are inevitably part of an AP operation so that your team can become more strategic in focus and nature. Scanning paper invoices, for example, can easily be assigned to a BPO provider who will also double-check the paper invoice against the captured version for you. This is an immediate time savings for your company’s AP team, and will move your organization closer to best-in-class status.
So there you have it—two success strategies that you can implement right now to move your team closer to becoming a best-in-class AP organization. There’s more to do as well, but to find out you’ll have to download (registration required) Ardent’s “ePayables 2014: The Quest” report from one of our sponsors: Ariba, Taulia, and Tradeshift. [Note: The report is also available directly from Basware].
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