Reduce Risk by Driving Intelligent Automation Across Your Accounts Payable and Financial Close Processes

The finance function is crucial to assessing an organization’s financial health, but stopping at manual processes and legacy tools prevents organizations from deriving long-term value.

Today, finance needs to be a strategic, data-driven, and digitally-focused function in order to improve productivity, reduce risk and reporting errors, and improve work-life balance. Leveraging technology not only enables organizations to remain competitive but also empowers them to look beyond the completion of finance tasks and utilize data analytics to further improve internal processes.

This eBook explores:

• The impact of manual methods on accounts payable (AP) and financial close processes
• The benefits of intelligent automation into your AP process
• How automation optimizes the invoice transaction process
• How automation enhances statement reconciliation
• The importance of deriving AP performance analytics
• The business impact of automation into AP and financial close processes

Consequences of Manual Processes for Organizations

While many accounting and finance professionals are resistant to change, it’s becoming more and more apparent that manual processes lead to many short- and long-term consequences for organizations.

Lack of Visibility

Tracking the current progress of the financial close and accounts payable processes is essential for every organization. Finance and accounting leaders may find it difficult to navigate the status of essential close tasks and accounts payable transactions.

Increased Errors

The more manual tasks there are, the more susceptible those tasks are to errors. Relying on human intervention for tasks that can be easily automated burdens accountants to repetitively track transactions and reconcile them.

Reduced Work-Life Balance

The accounting profession is known for a work-life imbalance, with many accountants sacrificing their holidays, evenings, and weekends to meet the deadlines of each financial close period.

Ineffective Controls

There’s no doubt that financial data affects the entire organization. Without a streamlined and automated process in place, it can be difficult to aim for a comprehensive compliance framework.

Benefits of Intelligent Automation in Your Accounts Payable Process

Simply put, intelligent automation is the enablement of data-driven business process automation. Implementing automation gives organizations much-needed real-time visibility and control with automated workflows and process enhancements. Some benefits include:

Optimize Invoice Transaction

By automating manual-heavy tasks and streamlining the invoice management process, AP teams can achieve better spend control, shorter invoice processing cycles, and shorter month-end cycles in advance of the reconciliation process.

Enhance Statement Reconciliation

By leveraging intelligent automation technology, organizations can automatically capture the invoice and statement data and document and match it against ledger information.

Capture AP Performance Analytics

Capturing data analytics from the AP function is instrumental in properly assessing your existing accounts payable processes and evaluating how they can be continuously improved upon.

THE BUSINESS IMPACT OF INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION

Implementing process automation benefits all stakeholders involved. Organizations that implement automation realize more than the short-term benefits — they also achieve a significant return on investment (ROI) in time savings.

Download the eBook to gain access to these sections in greater detail.