Are Excessive Volumes Of External Queries Taking Your Accounts Payable Staff From More Productive Wo

By Author: Donald Nason
Total Articles: 48
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Having to deal with external queries is the bane of many an Accounts Payable (AP) team member’s life. The man-hours involved in having to handle even simple enquiries, let alone those involving mislaid invoices, tracking down supporting documents, trying to locate on exactly whose desk an authorisation request is lurking – well, they all add up to creating a major headache for the AP department.

The need to cut down on time spent handling suppliers’ queries is a major requirement for many businesses – along with wanting to do away with inefficient manual processes and speed up the whole processing cycle.

Deal with that last requirement through implementing an invoice management solution and you automatically reduce the number of queries coming in – invoices are no long held up by the cumbersome manual process itself.

In addition, capturing invoices on receipt into the business – whether via scanning and OCR (optical character recognition) for paper invoices, or automatic capture for eInvoices – and storing them centrally along with supporting documents means no more lost invoices.

With ...
... automatic PO (purchase order) matching and powerful online coding and authorisation for non-PO invoices the whole cycle is streamlined and efficient – gone are the manual processing bottlenecks. With an invoice management solution alerts can be set to flag impending deadlines throughout the payment cycle, and so late payments are a thing of the past.

The business has already cut down on the risk of error within AP with automatic data capture reducing the amount of manual keying required and eliminating duplicate data entry, and any problem invoices are swiftly dealt with, automatically routed to the relevant person or department for resolution – and supplier notification generated for the cases that can’t be resolved.

There will, however, still be queries for the AP department.

But with invoices and supporting data now stored together and centrally in one place (but accessible from anywhere in the organisation 24/7), answering the query has become simple. Even locating where the invoice was in the processing cycle was a problem in the past – that information’s now available at the touch of a button.

Plus there’s a full audit history recording exactly where the invoice has been, and who’s been involved in processing.

The government recently announced that as part of their crackdown on late paying organisations they will be looking at ways to encourage SMEs to help themselves – through, for example, investing in new technologies, such as electronic invoicing which will mean greater ease of processing for those organisations with an automated solution.

Other technology to consider implementing is a supplier portal, allowing suppliers to upload invoices directly into the workflow process and resolve queries themselves.

Where suppliers are concerned, it’s all about building confidence. The fewer the genuine queries suppliers have to make, and knowing the business they’re dealing with has an efficient streamlined processing cycle, the less likely they are to pick up the phone but will wait for either payment or notification that there’s a problem.

Streamlining and automating AP means that for the business as well as reducing the volume of external queries, there’s the benefit of eliminating late payments and late payment interest, and eliminating the risk of a valued supplier refusing future business.