SmartDocs Smart Payables: Revolutionizing Accounts Payable for Today’s Business Environment
When reviewing the holistic procure to pay process jobs, you will find the payables jobs have a significant impact on the profitability of the corporation. Typically, most payables teams struggle to eliminate serious backlogs of invoices. Even with backlogs, the team is responsible for discovering and resolving any mistakes made in the P2P process before invoice receipt. Individuals making potential mistakes includes requestors, buyers, receiving, approvers, and suppliers.
Most mistakes result from lack of knowledge or carelessness, but the AP Team must always watch for fraudulent activity. It is not will you have fraud in your company but rather when will you have fraud!
Even in today’s AI business environments many Accounts Payable Processes are still manual. The AP Professional seldom has time to stop and consider all the variables that go into paying a supplier invoice timely and accurately. They are forced to assume others in the process have done their jobs properly but when you consider all the potential problems, exceptions will occur. Even those exceptions that are detected, in a manual process resolution is tremendous drain on resources. Due to the separation of duties required by accounting regulations, the AP Professional must rely on a fast response from individuals that were involved in the acquisition and receipt of the goods and services on the invoice in question. Often emails or phone calls are utilized to request assistance and response is usually one of the last jobs the responder will consider. They are busy acquiring new goods and services and don’t have time to support prior purchases.
Assuming a mostly manual process, where are the opportunities to assist the AP Professional in doing their daily jobs? Several opportunities are intuitively obvious: eliminate manual entry of invoice data fields by utilizing Optical Character Recognition to digitally capture document information; automate and optimize invoice review utilizing business rules running on an AI platform such as provided by SmartDocs Smart Payables integrated with SmartDocs OCR; eliminate disruptive repetitive inquiries from suppliers by providing a Supplier Portal; provide digital notification and access to ERP data to facilitate fast and accurate invoice exception resolution. The AP Professional also benefits from a digital assistant. Advanced digital reporting ensures early detection of repetitive exceptions so the AP Team can spend time on eliminating exceptions before they occur.
Some companies have attempted to improve AP processing through the implementation of complex software that merely automates the existing process with virtually no optimization resulting in increased backlogs and increased labor cost to use the new software.
SmartDocs has many years of experience in working with global corporations to first analyze how to improve the Accounts Payable Professional’s job and then implement a fully optimized solution.
