5 reasons why you should automate and optimise your account payables

Every company has different financial obligations that need to be fulfilled with a combination of payment tools. We have highlighted some use cases specific to certain industries to showcase how automation can make a difference in their operations. 

1) Save time

By automating your AP you will no longer be burdened by reimbursements, paper receipts and manual reconciliations. Research shows that this can help save between 30 minutes and 2 hours of time per employee per month. 

Recruitment companies and Food & Beverage outlets have a lot of their employees spending on the go. This includes transport, procurement and meal expenses. 

Before the advent of dedicated expense management tools, businesses had to manually take care of such spending. Employees generally had to pay out of their pockets, hold on to the receipts, fill out a claim form and wait for ages to be reimbursed. This was unreliable and there was no visibility of cash flow.

Digital Cash-Reimbursement would alleviate this problem. Currently, businesses spend a lot of time storing and processing cash reimbursement claims. A good software solution should help you capture, store, and process these documents quickly and conveniently. 

But the best solution would be to completely digitize transactions by empowering employees with company cards. This would completely eliminate the trouble of reimbursement forms and fraudulent expense claims. This way, both employees and managers would have freed up time that is better spent on important company strategies.

2) Visibility and improved security

The usual practice of having two or three cards getting passed around for a range of different expenses makes it difficult to view how much the company has spent in each department. This is where Employee Cards could prove beneficial. Each employee having access to a company card, allows you to monitor department spending, set transaction limits, improve transaction visibility and ensure budget control. These cards also help with improved security since sensitive data is no longer being passed around the office. 

Something else to keep in mind would be Team Building and Budget allocation features. By creating a team, you can easily compartmentalize spending and allocate a budget to each team depending on their requirement and use. 

This is a great way to track all department transactions and to improve visibility into spend patterns, which would help identify any spending abnormalities.

3) Saving on overseas transfers 

Most businesses resort to more traditional payment institutions such as banks as they are convenient and reliable. Unfortunately SMEs incur unnecessary costs as banks mark up cross border fees. 

So, looking for a non-traditional software that helps with savings is crucial for SMEs. Using third party applications to transfer overseas is a good idea since most of these platforms get better FX rates (anywhere between 0.1% to 0.3% less), saving your company a lot on overseas transfers. These savings can be put to much better use, like in marketing/advertising budgets or day-to-day operations.

4) Reduced human errors

The most painful part of settling invoices has to be the manual collection and auditing of vendor payment quotations. A few common problems that any company could encounter are:

Manual data entry: which is always time-consuming and can lead to lots of errors; and

Unnecessary Emails: Going back and forth to send invoices from person to person of various departments before anything gets approved. 

Automating your accounts payable can help you move away from this tedious process. This should help you eliminate the long manual process of data entry. Staff can electronically send data to the service provider and digitize the money trail. 

5) Increase productivity

Automating your accounts payable can save you time by avoiding tedious manual work. Your employees can focus on the tasks that concern them and have more time for the work they should be doing. That starts with finance but also with other teams who don’t know how accounts payable works and waste time finding out.