How Integrations in Accounts Payable Automation Lead to a More Efficient Business

Time-consuming processes, difficult-to-locate information, and tedious data entry are all significant hurdles in manual accounts payable processes. While Intelligent information management solutions (IIM) alone can greatly mitigate these challenges, saving time, reducing costs, and solving headaches, integrating with your organization’s financial system can provide further benefits, especially around the challenge of data entry.

Invoice and vendor data are needed for everything in the accounts payables process, from understanding payment terms to coding transactions. This data has historically needed to be entered manually, a time-consuming and error-prone process. 

Capturing information from invoices and vendors directly using OCR and web forms eliminates data entry into your financial system, facilitating further automation, reducing errors, and freeing up time. 

Below, we will discuss key areas of the accounts payable process that integrations enhance and how to determine whether integration will benefit your payables department.

3 Unique Functions of Accounts Payable Integrations

1 Streamlining Vendor Onboarding:

Onboarding vendors can be a highly time-consuming process. It requires a large amount of information from vendors to add them to your financial system, along with time-consuming forms for legal and tax purposes. Add the need to transcribe the data vendors provide into your financial system, and it’s easy to see why so many people find this process monotonous and inefficient.

Using the integration between an intelligent information management solution and your financial system, you can send vendors secure web forms that collect necessary information and guide them through forms like W-9s. This process will automatically archive these forms while creating the onboarded vendor in your financial system. The result is saved time and reduced errors for greater departmental efficiency.

2 Simplifying General Ledger Coding

General ledger coding is a tedious but necessary process for tracking an organization’s transactions. Many of these transactions are entered manually into an organization’s financial system, creating opportunities for troublesome errors, as even a single misplaced decimal can massively throw off the ledger.

By using document capture to lift invoices in any form, the lifted data can be used to code these transactions automatically. This allows staff to focus on quality assurance rather than the entire data entry process, increasing their efficiency and ensuring no errors slip through their grasp.

AI-assisted capture takes these benefits even further, resulting in far fewer errors for staff to correct and eliminating time and costs associated with capture templates.\

3 Automating Payable Invoice Creation

Payable invoices are key to determining when payments for goods and services are due and what discounts are available to your organization, but generating these invoices requires information from the vendor invoice that is often manually entered into a financial system to find these results.

Integrating IIM with your financial solution eliminates this data entry entirely, giving your staff clear visibility into payment terms and conditions in record time. This visibility also allows your staff to manage priorities and ensure timely payments to vendors for improved relationships.

When to Invest in Accounts Payable Integrations

Integrations can provide great benefits for the payables process, but determining the right time to implement this component of your solution depends on several factors.

• Error-prone processes: If you notice frequent errors in your financial database involving vendor information, general ledger transactions, and other information dependent on invoices, your payables department may be overwhelmed. Integrations can automate data entry and allow your staff to focus on quality assurance so that they can better balance speed and diligence.
• Slowing efficiency: Are crucial steps in the payables process like vendor onboarding, payable invoice creation, and general ledger coding taking time away from other tasks? Integrations can automate these steps, freeing up your team to focus on more value-driving tasks.
• Increased Focus on Security: Invoices and vendor onboarding forms frequently contain personally identifiable and financial data that can compromise your business partners if not handled correctly. Not only will this likely sour relationships with the affected vendor, but it may also result in fines from state regulators. Using an encrypted solution with clear access controls greatly helps protect this data, but ensuring this data travels directly from invoices to your financial system prevents breaches from paper notes and invoice copies often used as references for data entry.
• Mounting costs: Are invoice processing costs becoming difficult to bear? Integrations streamline the payables process allowing your organization to take advantage of vendor discounts and freeing up time for revenue-generating activities.

Summary

Integrations between intelligent information management and financial platforms facilitate highly efficient, error-free processes that free up time for more optimal use. By capturing crucial information from vendors and invoices and putting it into action in highly effective workflows, your organization can better allocate staff time, reduce costs, enhance security, and ensure lasting and fruitful vendor relationships.

Square 9 is a leading provider of AI-powered intelligent information management solutions that take the paper out of work and make it easier to get things done. With digital workflows that automate many aspects of how you work today, we make it easy by extracting information from scans or PDFs, storing documents in a searchable archive, and building digital twins of your current processes through graphical workflows.