By offering a digital workflow to manage processes that were previously handled by accounts payable staff members, accounts payable automation makes it possible for businesses to process supplier bills without requiring any interaction from a human being.

A holistic approach to accounts payable automation provides fully automated payment processing for businesses from start to finish. This begins with software that reads invoices and converts them into a digital format. This is typically accomplished using some kind of scanning or capturing method, such as optical character recognition (OCR). After the data has been classified, matched, and validated by the AP system, it is forwarded to the accounting system or the ERP to be processed.

Automation of accounts payable can give a company significant cost reductions that go above and beyond the savings that can be expected from the elimination of human operations. Companies have the ability to optimize their vendor portfolio, so reducing the risk of fraud, avoiding repeated or incorrect payments, and taking advantage of early payment savings.

How Does Accounts Payable Automation Benefit AP Departments?

The success of AP departments can be attributed to the use of automation tools for AP. It enables:

  • Processing of invoices that is quick, accurate, and exact to the minute
  • Better time management enables accounts, and payable managers, to spend less time on manual tasks and more time on work that adds strategic value to their company.
  • Enables full visibility of invoices, spending, and cash flow management, which guarantees that accounts payable teams will always be able to close the books on time.

How to select accounts payable automation software?

Companies that are interested in automating their accounts payable should do extensive research on the many AP automation options available in order to find the one that is the most suitable for their firm. Accounting outsourcing companies like Bright Outsource Bookkeeping can also help to select accounts payable processing software and do integration for you. To guarantee complete automation of the AP processing and significant time and money savings, it is essential that the accounts payable automation software that is chosen be capable of supporting all of the use cases for invoice processing that are required by the company.

In addition, it is essential to have an understanding of how the AP automation software interfaces with the ERP of a firm in order to ensure that the data is synchronized and that the processing is optimized. The ability to move master data from the ERP to the AP solution is made possible by integration with the ERP. In general, accounts payable automation solutions provide a variety of ERP integrations, ranging from pre-packaged to fully managed connectors.

What is vendor invoice processing?

The full process of receiving an invoice for a vendor, approving it, paying the invoice, and finally documenting it in accounting books is what is meant by the term "processing of vendor invoices." A bill is a complete financial transaction that begins when an invoice is paid and ends when a receipt for the transaction is generated. Historically, every step of this procedure was carried out by hand, which necessitated a significant amount of time and effort.

Your financial team will be able to automate this laborious procedure, thereby saving time that was previously spent on work that was repetitive when they use software that manages accounts payable. In addition to this, it minimizes the possibility of human mistakes, which helps eliminate differences when syncing transactions with accounting software.