The accounts payable process can be a time consuming and labor-intensive process. Invoices arrive on a daily basis, some be email and some by postal service. The accounts payable staff generally have a daily routine which involves a few things:

Once the supplier invoices are organized and invoices that require approval are then distributed to the approvers for review, approval and assignment to the ledger. The approval process comes with it's own set of challenges:

If procurement is issuing Purchase Orders, then any incoming invoices that reference an issued purchase order will have a PO number on it. The invoices with PO numbers will need to be matched against the actual Purchase Order to ensure there are no discrepancy with the pricing or items ordered.

In order to process invoices for payment the AP Staff are required to enter invoices into the financial system in order to issues the payment to the supplier. The process of entering invoices requires the AP Staff to manually key all of the relevant details on each and every invoice into the financial system. Not only is this a very slow process, this isn't make very good use of the AP Staff's time.

The traditional approach to processing accounts payable invoices relies heavily on people and manual processes. With advent of Accounts Payable Workflow it made it easier to automatically route invoices to approvers using electronic workflow queues. Now let's take that a step further as Accounts Payable Automation leverages both invoice workflow and automated PO invoice matching and by combining both of these with integration to the financial system the ability exists to completely eliminate the need to manually enter or key invoices for payment processing.

Description
Our team is seeking an Accounts Payable (AP) Specialist who will be responsible for processing (i.e., coding and entering) and paying vendor invoices and employee expenses in a timely manner.

Essential Functions

• Check accuracy of invoices and confirm against budget for indirect cost
• Validate services invoices against approved time and expenses
• Match invoices with Purchase Orders
• Send invoices to managers for payment approval
• Input and code invoices to correct cost centers
• Review expense reimbursement receipts for accuracy against project setup
• Prepare weekly schedule of payables due and coordinate with the cash flow process
• Set up approved for payment employee expense reimbursements, vendor and subcontractor invoices in banking template for payment
• Prepare payment register and enter payment data into accounting system
• First point of contact for debtor inquiries
• Perform reconciliations, including supplier statement reconciliations
• Support the month-end close process
• Report of Aged Payables plus other ad hoc reporting where applicable
• Support the annual audit process related to the accounts payable function
• Other tasks as requested to support the accounting team
  
  

Required Qualifications

• Minimum 3-years relevant experience
• Experienced in accounting practices
• Preference to  certifications in accounting

You seek a candidate with relevant job experience, skilled in accounting practices, they will be involved in the cash flow for your business, the need to make quick business decisions that effect your supply chain and vendor relationships.

However, with all this in mind, they will spend between 40 - 60 percent (or more) of their day manual keying invoices into the financial system for payment processing.  Seems like all this experience could be used to better serve the business and their interest in a career in accounting.

You went through the process of advertising (costs money), interviewing candidates (costs time & money), hiring and training the new hire (costs time and money) and in the end they spend more time keying invoices than any other function.

Does manual invoice keying make the best use of your AP Staff's time?

Lack of Visibility.
Tracking current progress into financial close and accounts payable processes is essential for every organization. Without real-time updates, finance and accounting leaders may find it difficult to navigate the status of essential close tasks and AP transactions.

Increased Errors.
The more manual your tasks are, the more susceptible those tasks are to errors. Relying on human intervention for tasks that can be easily automated not only burdens accountants to repetitively track transactions and reconcile them, but it also increases the potential for violating compliance regulations.

Ineffective Controls.
Financial data affects the entire organization. Accounts payable teams must manually upload invoices and transactional updates into ERP systems, while accounting teams are dependent on the general ledger information when performing reconciliations to ensure their internal controls are being met. Without a standardized and automated process in place, F&A teams may find difficulty in achieving comprehensive compliance.

Fewer errors
Manual data entry inevitably results in human error. With electronic data capture technology, you get over 99% accuracy on every invoice. Plus, the automation system flags any suspicious invoices for manual review. That lets you catch potential problems and take care of them early on.

Real-time reporting and data analysis
With financial automation software, users are able to view real-time dashboards that display vital information regarding the status of a financial report. With access to real-time data, a business can make decisions based on factual data at any time without waiting for the end of the month to have access to accurate data.

Vision360 Enterprise is an AP Automation platform intended to assist in streamlining all aspects of accounts payable invoice processing. For more information consider attending one of our information webinars or contact us directly and we'll be happy to answer any questions.

Contact us directly for more information or consider attending one of our informational webinars.

If you've been utilizing an AP Automation system for 3 years or more chances are your system has not kept pace with the needs of your AP department. Your AP Automation system probably has not kept up with the latest technologies in speed and performance, or business process efficiencies gains and compliance requirements. 

Many AP departments using older AP Automation system admit that there are limitations to these systems and that there is still a fair number of manual steps and intervention required by AP Staff to accurately process supplier invoices.

Not to mention: 

• Rising Annual Software Maintenance Costs
• Unreasonable Upgrade Costs
• Being Forced to Upgrade
• High Licensing Costs
• Limited Scalability
• Poor OCR Accuracy
• No AP Dashboards
• No Executive Dashboards
• No Vendor Notifications
• No Ability to Auto-Match Invoices
• Lacking KPI's, Reporting & Analytics
• AP Inefficiencies and Poor Touchless Rates
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Is your AP Automation system keeping pace? By today's standards AP Automation solutions are reaching rates of 80% - 90% touchless processing efficiencies. If you're AP Staff is having to touch more than 20% of supplier invoices, then it might be time to revisit your AP Automation. 

Does this sound like you?

Vision360 Enterprise AP Automation accomplishes all of the above and much, much more. Organizations like Welch's, Yankee Candle, Harrington Healthcare, Ames Tools, MKS Instruments, King & Prince Seafood and many, many more are realizing incredible efficiency gains and savings utilizing Vision360 Enterprise AP Automation for processing their supplier invoices.

The problem starts with the fact that invoices are often not sent to the Accounts Payable (AP) department. They are frequently sent to the person who purchased the product or service and may sit on that person’s desk for days or even weeks. Then there’s more time and effort forwarding the invoice to AP before it can be entered into the accounting system. 

Sometimes departmental procedures are methodical, but create even more paper – one study found that invoices were being copied and filed up to nine times. 

But plenty of challenges exist within the AP department as well. Whether received directly from the supplier or forwarded from elsewhere in the organisation, invoice processing is very labour intensive. Besides the obvious mail handling and data entry activity, invoices must somehow be coded with appropriate purchase categories and GL accounts. That alone may require a lot of time-consuming research by AP personnel. 

In order to make sure the charges are valid, invoices need to be compared to one or more POs or a contract, and receipt of the goods or service needs to be confirmed. That takes more time. If the information isn’t available or the invoice doesn’t match the information AP has access to, the invoice needs to be sent to an appropriate person for review and approval. That takes more time. 

The more this is done with paper, the more time it takes and the more cost it accumulates. 

There is no question that paper invoice handling is the enemy of efficiency in the AP department. Scanning invoices into a document management system can help, but by no means solves the entire problem. 

Receiving invoices electronically helps more, but only if the rest of the process is set up to really use the information in an automated fashion. 

The “mail latency”, “desk float” and “information chase” associated with manual invoice processing results in a number of problems: 
• Management does not have visibility of outstanding liabilities 
• Invoices are beyond the discount period before they even enter the AP system 
• The potential for paying duplicate invoices increases as suppliers send second copies 
• The inclination to “just pay it” becomes greater when the validation process is too cumbersome 
• AP personnel spend a high percentage of their time answering inquiries from suppliers about payment status 
• Suppliers may stop delivering inventory or services when invoices are not paid on time 
• Audits become long, costly and problematic 

And that is all in addition to the direct cost of invoice processing – primarily Accounts Payable personnel and departmental operating costs. In their 2011 Benchmark study, Aberdeen Group found that the industry average cost to process an invoice was $15.61. “Laggard” companies (bottom 30%) ) had an even larger average cost of $38.77, while “Best-in-Class” companies (top 20%) had an average cost of just $3.09.