If you’re a Business Central user, you’re probably familiar with the accounts payables capabilities offered by the ERP. It’s an impressive list.
Using the software, you can set up and maintain vendor records, enter and import invoices, track details, and print checks. It also integrates with your general ledger, purchase orders, and project costing to provide you some unified data. Information such as your aged payables report (for tracking outstanding balances) is available, and you can also track things like vendor transaction reports, and AP invoices by job.
All in all, it provides you with a good base for managing your payables. With all of that in mind, it might be tempting to think, “If it’s not broken, why fix it?” But ask yourself this:
How would it impact our cash forecasting and growth initiatives if we had 9x faster invoice processing?
What if, instead of being bogged down by routine tasks, our AP team could take a proactive, strategic approach to payments? An approach that could improve our cash flow?
And what if we could accomplish all of this while improving customer satisfaction vendor relationships while earning us the best possible rates?
That’s the promise of AP automation. It takes you from good to great.
How AP automation transforms your processes
Adopting an automation solution transforms every aspect of the payables process, starting with how you receive invoices. Thanks to optical character recognition (OCR), artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML), invoices land in your system already captured and coded, no typing required. That means no more time spent sifting through invoices, manually entering the data in your system, and then spending even more time making corrections when the inevitable typo occurs.
“Eighteen percent of accountants make financial errors at least daily, with a third making at least a few financial errors every week, and over half (59%) making several errors per month…”
Typos don’t just plague the invoice entry process. Without an end-to-end automation solution, your team also spends a significant amount of time each day transferring data between systems. That opens the door to more errors. The most generous of estimates predicts that manual data entry has a 1% error rate. It may not sound like a lot on the surface, but imagine the impact it would have on your finances if 1 out of every 100 invoices or transactions in your system were incorrect.
AP automation handles this situation by integrating your tech stack, so that information is centrally located on the cloud and shared between systems like your ERP. In fact, an AP automation solution typically reduces your manual data entry by 83%, giving your team time to focus on more productive work.
Think of the impact it would have if your finance team could spend time:
- Identifying early payment discounts and optimising your payment schedule
- Analysing your SLAs to ensure that they are being adhered to
- Leveraging your payment history to ensure more favorable rates
With the time saved by automation, members of your AP team can do just that. By helping you capture a greater percentage of early payment discounts, they even transform payables into a revenue generating department!
Accounts Payable (AP) teams, on average, only capture about 58% of available discounts.
With the ability to enforce strict controls, reduce manual errors, and detecting fraud through features like automated workflows, digital audit trails, real-time alerts, and AI-driven anomaly detection, automation also makes your payables process more secure.
AI-assistance scans every incoming invoice, identifying any duplicates that may occur. Using machine learning, the software is also trained to recognise unusual data within an invoice that may indicate fraud. These invoices are then flagged for review by a member of your AP team.
The systems automated workflows allow you to set rules, such as the division of labor, so that the person issuing a payment and the person approving payment are different. This helps reduce the risk of fraudulent payouts. This can also be aided by the ability to require multiple signatures and approvals for transactions over a certain amount.
79% of organisations were victims of payments fraud attacks/attempts in 2024
It’s your money. Don’t settle!
When it comes to your finances, anything less than the best isn’t enough. That’s why it pays to take your AP process from good to great. MS Business Central gives you a great foundation. AP automation gives you the speed, visibility and control you wish it already had.
To discover more about how you can supercharge your AP process, book a demo with Quadient today.
