Accounts Payable: 2022 Trends for Optimization

What’s Trending in Accounts Payable Automating Processes Automation in business is no longer a luxury, but a need in order to stay relevant and compliant. The shift to work from home initiated by the Covid-19 pandemic created a demand for fully digitized processes, allowing employees to collaborate and share data from any remote location. This is especially relevant within finance and accounts payable due to the cost savings associated with increased automation. A recent study by Ardent Partners suggests manual data entry and inefficient processes to be the top pain point in Accounts Payable, with 43% of enterprise businesses surveyed voicing this concern. Implementing automation tools to assist with these mundane tasks allows your team to focus on solving more strategic, long-term initiatives. Accessible AI AI plays a massive role in automating processes, enabling automation to perform more complex tasks and deliver more accurate outputs. The most promising solutions, including Invari, utilize AI and machine learning to reduce manual data entry and eliminate human error. Processes that are currently being improved with AI integration include invoice capture and extraction, invoice validation, approvals, duplicate and fraud detection. Paperless Processing Part of automating the invoicing process includes introducing a fully touch-free, paperless environment. Not only does this allow invoices to be paid faster and more efficiently, but also provides a more secure way to store bills and invoices in one centralized database, which is especially important in a hybrid/remote workspace. With this functionality also introduces the importance of user management packages. It is impertinent to have a solution with customizable permissions to help your organization optimizes processes without sacrificing the security & integrity of your data. Decreased Payment Processing Lifecycle The main goal in AP today is to streamline the workflow and shorten the payment processing lifecycle. It currently costs $10 on average to process a single invoice, and at least 10 days time-to-process. By utilizing a centralized invoice management platform, the time and cost per invoice can be cut down by 80%. This in turn allows for more time to be spent focusing on value-adding operations including data analysis and financial management.