How AP Automation Can Help Your Business Increase Revenue?
Today, organizations with a forward approach are increasingly adopting AP automation, realizing its strategic value in generating revenue. Additionally, automating accounts payable processes enables the business to monitor and review cash flow and identify the vulnerable areas in their financial management cycle.
Digitalizing mission-critical business operations like finance reconciliation turns accounts payable (AP) departments into a revenue-creating vertical rather than a revenue seeping hole. In this blog, let's explore how AP automation can help your business generate more revenue.
Key Revenue Driving Indicators By Embracing AP Automation
AP Automation Scales Productivity
Studies say that more than a quarter of the weekly work hours in the AP process are spent on manual tasks such as data entry, invoice matching, exception handling and vendor coordination. These are labour-intensive, repetitive activities that could demote employee's morale for low-value activities.
AP automation can overturn the scenario by automating the repetitive tasks involved in the invoice processing cycle to let employees focus on high-value tasks. By automating manual data entry and invoice validation with advanced OCR technologies, these systems can reduce humans intervention while resolving the discrepancies identified by the system. This can empower the AP team to engage in higher value-added activities resulting in improved productivity.
Eliminates Costly Duplicate Payments
Avoiding duplicate payments help businesses to curb losses, boosts profit, and assist companies in preserving better cash flow. On average, about 0.05% of invoices paid are payments made in error, and manual AP processes are more prone to it.
Businesses can prevent duplicate invoices with intelligent invoice matching technology with advanced AP solutions by employing an AI-driven AP automation system. It helps identify fraudulent invoices accurately in real-time by reviewing vendor master files to detect and remove duplicate vendor files and outdated vendor data.
Reduce Costs and Manual Effort
As a labour-intensive process that navigates through different phases and touchpoints, AP processing is costly and especially so in a fully manual AP cycle.
AP automation unifies the touchpoints and makes it easy to capture data, integrate departments, govern controls, and analyze data. Also, modern AI-based AP systems simplify data storage, optimize data processing and reduce cloud infrastructure costs. Overall, AP automation reduces costs, thereby improving the bottom line resulting in a faster return on investment
Reduce AP Processing Times
Based on a study conducted among the companies in the US, generally, a company spends up to $25 pushing one invoice through a paper-based AP system. Meanwhile, half of all businesses take between 5 to 15 days to process a single invoice manually. Moreover, manual AP or partly automated cycles used to create bottlenecks leaving the whole team stranded.
AP automation enables businesses to optimize the AP processing cycle and experience excellence in vendor invoice processing workflow. Further, it can reduce the processing time to 2-3 days and line up the invoices in the approval queue. Thus, collectively, employing an advanced AP automation solution can reduce the overall cost of processing a single invoice up to 60%.
Earn Early Payment Discounts
Studies reveal that majority of suppliers give a reduction on invoices in exchange for early invoice payment. But, unfortunately, most companies fail to take advantage of discounts on early invoice payment.
Having a fast vendor invoice payment process cycle can help businesses take advantage of early payment discounts. It will open the opportunities to negotiate discounts with suppliers, improve revenue, save money, improve vendor relationship, credit report, and enhance the entire supply chain process. Also, businesses can bring off better visibility over deadlines and control over cash flows.
Improve Supplier Relationships
To foster a healthy vendor relationship, companies need robust coordination between the procurement and invoice processing teams. Most of the time, the time-consuming invoice investigation and delays hamper the seamless relationship with vendors. Having an intelligent AP solution in place, businesses can nurture supplier relationships by faster invoice approval, timely payment, improved compliance, and strengthen businesses to make informed decisions.
Bottom Line:
The host of benefits of an automated AP system is not ending here. Leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, AP automation solutions like Applexus InSITE transforms the accounts payable process holistically. It can empower an AP team with innovative features from intelligent data capturing to automated invoice validation to advanced invoice data analytics. In addition, Applexus InSITE promises organization to realize faster user adoption and thereby ROI leveraging its rapid deployment and intuitive UI. Hence in an attempt to improve the efficiency of your AP team aiming at enhancing ROI, a fully automated AI-powered AP software system like Applexus InSITE is the go-to option.
