Accounts Payable (ap) Department Among Top Three Most Popular For Moving To Paper-free

By Author: Donald Nason
Total Articles: 48
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A recent report from AIIM (Association for Information and Image Management), ‘Winning the Paper Wars – capture the content and mobilize the process troops’, puts the Accounts Payable (AP) department among the top three business areas organisations want to move to paper-free. The AIIM report, based on the results of a survey of 563 AIIM members, also states that investment in automating AP processing is set to grow.

There are many reasons that organizations give for wanting to advance to an AP paper-free solution. That the AP department is one of the most ‘paper rich’ in any organisation, and manual Accounts Payable processing time consuming, susceptible to error and often responsible for costly commercial delay seems to be the bottom line.

Removing the mass of paper and the requirements for physical handling plus the automation of many of the manual processes frees AP staff to concentrate on more strategic tasks. As well as being able to tap in to early-payment discounts, the requirements to eliminate duplicate invoices and avoid late payments plus their associated financial penalties are cited as grounds ...
... for automating.

Eliminating late payments also helps foster better supplier relationships, as does faster query response and payment cycle times.
And along with improving efficiency comes reducing processing costs as a major requisite.

Much has been made in the past of organisations’ concerns about automating and compliance issues – but this fear appears to be rapidly diminishing. In fact the AIIM report states that creating better records for compliance and audit trail purposes is now seen as a more important reason for moving to a paper-free solution than the faster response and improved productivity gains.

It was interesting to read an article, also by AIIM, ‘Paper vs. Electronic: when best evidence isn’t good enough’, which described a recent court case in New York. The judge pronounced against a business which had failed to keep electronic files after printing information to hard-copy on the basis that information had been lost which might have been vital to the case. As the AIIM article said, “What this means is that hard-copy documents no longer stand as worthy substitutes for the electronically-stored information they embody... they really only tell part of the story, and, often, the least important part.”

So implementing an invoice management solution reduces costs, improves efficiency, enhances visibility and control, and maintains legal compliance.

And automating AP often becomes the first step in a move to more paper-free processing generally within an organisation. After experiencing first-hand the benefits automating brings, businesses are keen to roll-out the advantages across other departments.

AIIM’s report puts HR (Human Resources) and customer correspondence as the other two main departments organisations look to automate along with AP. Other business areas often identified as priority for automating include accounts receivable (AR), document archive, customer services, and procurement and expense processing.