The accounts payable department of a company is one of its most important building blocks. However, it has been one of the slowest to adapt to change. However, this shift is now being accelerated due to the trends of automation taking flight amongst accountants across the world. Due to increasing automation, making invoices becomes more accessible and easier to manage. It helps optimize payments and makes sure that minimal human errors occur.

This article will explore what accounts payable teams are, how they are made, and how they make accounts payable more efficient. Read on ahead to find out.

You can reduce the size of your teams

AP automation can help you reduce the size of the accounts payable teams. When you automate the tasks, less human intervention exists, and a lesser chance of human error exists. This is an excellent advantage for the company you are working for because you might see duplicate entries if purely manual work is being done. Due to duplicate entries, a company can experience losses of up to $15 million, which is not an amount to be scoffed at. Digitising your accounts payable means increasing the number of vendors but not the number of people working in the AP department. This is the meaning of making your AP department more efficient.

All these processes also help you bill more invoices than you usually do. Getting more invoices means that more payments are made. This, in turn, makes sure that your company is earning profit in droves.

Less time on data entry and reconciliation

Data entry is one of the most tedious tasks you can ever face as an accountant. Just as it sounds, it involves manually inputting the data into a system. This task can get monotonous and boring to the extreme. However, automating this process, the AP workflow has excellent advantages. Automating the workflow means that all the values can be put in automatically, and all you need to verify the data.

Another part of an accountant’s job that is made more accessible by automation is data reconciliation. What does that mean? It means the reporting of the payments or any form of transaction that has taken place. When this process is automated, the verification of invoices becomes more straightforward, and so does your life as an accountant. This is why making sure that your AP workflow is automated is one of the most important aspects of any business.

Make more payments more efficiently

Payments are much more efficient when the process is automated. You don’t need to worry about the invoices that have to be reported as paid. Why is it so? That is because the computer handles those. Making payments efficiently is very important. It builds a sense of trust between you and your vendor and ensures there is no chance of fraud. To do so, automating your AP workflow is the best way.

What does AP automation do to make the system so efficient? First of all, it makes sure that all transactions are end-to-end encrypted. This means that other than the sender and the receiver, nobody else will have any idea about the details of the transaction. Another advantage is that due to the highly intuitive nature of the workflow, there will be absolutely no margin of error. As a result, no mistakes or redundancy of the invoices benefit the company significantly.

Help you use corporate credit cards

Corporate credit cards are risky. They are very prone to fraud and can cause your company a lot of losses if misused. However, you might be asking, why use it? One significant advantage of using a corporate credit card is getting discounts using them. These discounts may not seem much at first, but when you get discounts of up to 20% on bulk purchases, these transactions become valuable for every company. Automation helps and makes this process of availing of discounts much easier.

When you are using an automated system, it knows how secure a transaction is by running it through some software. It can ensure the safety of the transaction ID of a vendor by verifying it. Hence, going through this process becomes extremely easy and makes automation a must-have for companies.

Conclusion

In conclusion, ensuring that you have automated your AP workflow is very important. Automation doesn’t just make your systems more efficient; it helps you earn more too. It is a way to ensure the safety of your transactions while also ensuring that everything is done on time. This makes automation one of the most important, if not the most important, tasks to be done with your AP workflow. Hopefully, you could convince yourself of the same after reading this article.