How AP Automation Is About to Shake Up Your Accounting Department
If you haven’t yet integrated AP automation software, your accounting department may be about to transform forever. AP automation is a disruptive, new type of software meant to streamline and simplify your AP process. But how exactly does it work? And how can it change your accounting department for the better?
The Basics of AP Automation
AP automation software is designed to take over or replace tasks that would otherwise be assigned to human beings. Using the power of AI, these types of tools can carry out a wide range of responsibilities on behalf of your human AP team, such as.
Documentation: In some cases, AP automation can help you with documentation.
Payment processing: AP automation excels at payment processing, ensuring your due invoices are paid in full and on time, consistently.
Invoice management: Invoices can be tough to track and manage, but AP automation removes human effort from the equation.
Purchase order (PO) alignment: With the help of AP automation, you can practice better purchase order alignment, ensuring all your outgoing purchase orders are appropriate and consistently handled.
Payment matching: Thanks to AP automation, you can take care of payment matching without manual intervention, ensuring you’re invoiced for the proper amount.
Fraud mitigation: And since AP automation is exceptionally trained and highly reliable, it’s incredibly useful for detecting and mitigating fraud.
How Does AP Automation Help Your Accounting Department?
Already, you can see how AP automation has the power to help your accounting department. But let’s be more specific about the potential benefits.
Adherence to best practices for AP is relatively simple and easy to understand, but these principles are easy to break in a live environment. As a human being, you can get distracted by other responsibilities or your forgetfulness can get the better of you – but with a machine, no such problems exist. AP automation software is designed to adhere to best practices by default, so you never have to worry about deviating from standard procedures.
Faster processing. As you might imagine, automation is much faster at completing tasks than manual effort expended by human beings. Even simple tasks, like submitting payment for an invoice, can go from taking a few minutes to taking only a few seconds. While this, in isolation, may not seem like much, when you’re automating thousands of such procedures, the benefits become immediately obvious.
Time savings. Accordingly, AP automation software has the potential to save you time, and in multiple respects. You’ll spend less time overall, as an organization on menial and repetitive tasks. You’ll likely have less of a need for staff members, so you can reduce total hours spent by human beings. And, because your core staff members won’t be bogged down with tedious responsibilities, they can spend their time and energy on more significant matters.
Responsibility adjustments. You need your brightest minds working on your most critical tasks and projects – and with AP being nearly totally automated, they’ll be in a prime position to do it.
Cost savings: For many businesses, AP automation has the potential to save a lot of money. It does cost some money and time to get started with AP automation software, but once launched, this program can lower your transactional costs, lower your labor costs, and benefit the business in countless other ways to offset its ongoing price.
Improved efficiency: AP departments tend to run faster and with fewer issues when backed by the power of automation. AI isn’t capable of making the types of mistakes that humans make, ultimately saving you time and headaches. And because it follows a consistent, standard procedure at blistering speeds, you can rest assured that things will flow faster than ever.
Fraud prevention: As an added bonus, some AP automation software comes with built-in features to detect and prevent fraud. It’s not a total replacement for your existing cybersecurity strategy, but it can greatly reduce the cost of fraud to your organization.
The Future of AP Automation
AP automation is somewhat new, but it’s already making a huge impact in the accounting world. Thanks to recursive machine learning and the ongoing efforts of software engineers, this type of software is set to only get better from here. In a generation or two, AP automation software will likely gain access to a wide range of new functions and perform in measurably better ways. In a decade or two, automation software may be so powerful that it has the potential to replace entire departments for some organizations.
It’s not entirely clear what the future of AI or automation are. But one thing we know for sure is that AP automation can help your accounting department now – so it’s worth exploring if you’re interested in saving time, saving money, or streamlining efficiency.
