Are you still stuck with the manual way of processing your invoices? Businesses that have adopted invoice automation enjoy numerous benefits like proactive payment requests, lower invoice processing costs, and reduced errors, among others.
Your business, too, can enjoy these and more benefits that come with automating the invoice process. This simple guide provides you a comprehensive overview of invoice automation. Read on!
What Is Invoice Automation Processing?
Traditionally, you manage your invoices from the accounting department upon receiving an invoice from a supplier. The invoice is crosschecked and approved before it is recorded and posted for payment. Usually, where a company is large, this process might go through a series of stages.
Invoice automation processing reduces the amount of time, resources, and steps involved in making payments. The automation processing uses software to extra, capture, and register payment details easily and fast.
Benefits of Automating the Invoice Processing
Automated invoice processing is beneficial in several ways. The most significant benefit is the reduction of your business’s procure-to-pay cycle by up to 80%. Other advantages include:
- Minimal errors: The traditional process of invoice management is not only tiresome but also prone to errors. With the automated approach, you reduce manual entries, eliminating the possibilities for mistakes.
- Faster approvals: Companies using the manual process of handling payments require more time to receive, capture, record, and approve invoices. Adopting automation in your invoice processes quickens the approval time while reducing the processing time.
- High savings: You will save a lot of money in terms of labor costs. Besides, since there are minimal manual entries, your employees can focus on other critical business tasks.
- Enhances relationships: Invoice automation processing will liberate your staff from the tedious tasks involved in the manual processing of invoices. Additionally, with this approach, you have a more transparent relationship with vendors.
- Protection against fraud. In every growing technology, hackers are getting cleverer but so should you. You need to protect yourself from accounts payable frauds in small business to avoid huge loses.
How to Choose the Best Solution for Automated Invoice Processing
Invoice processing software has become a must-have for modern business. However, with over 3,000 software solutions, how do you know what is suitable for your business? Here are a few aspects to consider when hunting for the best software for automated invoice processing:
- Unified Console
Automating your accounts payable ensures that everything is easily accessible. The best solution should have a unified console. This feature provides you with a single dashboard that makes it easy to manage vendors, invoices, buyers, and financial data.
- Ease of Customization
Every company has its way of handling invoices. The best automation software should allow you flexibility in creating workflows that have customized invoicing solutions. Superior software should make it easy for you to include your preferred branding elements.
- Monitoring and Reporting
How much data can your software scan into the system? Transparency is an essential aspect of building long-lasting relationships with staff and vendors. However, it cannot be easy to achieve this if you do not have proper monitoring and reporting mechanisms. Therefore, you need an automation platform that scans more data, making it easy to learn the trends and patterns.
As the accounts payable automation market continues to grow, you will need better and more effective measures to manage your invoices. Ensure you evaluate any tool before committing to it to ensure it’s the best for your business.