How to build a more resilient, influential AP department
Welcome to the AP of the Future
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The past few years have presented unimaginable challenges for organizations. Supply chain shortages, temporary closures, and fluctuating sales led businesses to realize they need to bolster the resiliency of their business processes.
One example:
AP departments that still dealt with paper invoices, check runs, and other paper-based processes found they needed to change in the first few months of the pandemic – and fast. They rose to the challenge and rapidly adjusted to remote work, while dealing with the blind spots discovered, to help their organizations continue completing crucial tasks and stay in business.
Look Back to Look Ahead
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AP professionals did what needed to be done to help their organizations get through the intense months of the pandemic. Now, it’s time to consider new AP improvements you can make to ensure your team has the time, tools, and empowerment to move from a back-office function to a strategic powerhouse within your organization.
Draw on the lessons learned over the last few years to:
Use the tips that follow to help your team grow professionally and establish the AP department as the champion of change in your organization.
Establish best practices and policies to level set efficient AP processes.
Help your team meet the next challenge… and the one after that.
Free up time so that AP can help your organization meet its business goals.
Find better ways to handle AP tasks to improve not just the employee experience in AP, but throughout the organization.
Look at your data to see how your employees are spending their time.
Look at your data to see how your employees are spending their time. Are they spending the majority of their day auditing expense reports or tracking down receipts, or answering employee questions about how to process a credit card transaction? Those are actual minutes that you can give back to them to refocus on different tasks that have a bigger impact on your company’s bottom line. – Jameson Hughes, Client Sales Executive for the SAP Concur Organization
Establish best practices and policies to level set efficient AP processes
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Create a Vendor Invoice Management Policy
A great first step to take when improving AP processes is to document your vendor invoice policies in a clear, concise document. An effective vendor invoice policy will:
[CEROS OBJECT]Free up time so that AP can help your organization meet its business goals.
An effective vendor invoice policy can help businesses experience a 13% faster payment to vendors. If you don’t yet have a policy, use our Vendor Invoice Policy Template to get started.
Communicate the benefits of the policy
Outline submission and approval steps
Assign important roles
Ensure that everyone in your company knows how to align invoicing processes at work
An effective invoice policy can greatly reduce the amount of time you spend on:
Processing vendor invoices
Gathering approvals
Addressing errors, exceptions, and noncompliant spend
Storing, retaining, and pulling documents for research, audit, or litigation
While there’s an upfront time commitment to create or update your invoice policy, it will be a great time saver in the long run.
MVP Tip
3 Ways to Get Started
An effective policy can help your AP teams spend up to 75% less time processing an invoice. The easier a policy is to understand and find, the easier it will be for employees to follow and comply.
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Invite participation
Get input from members of different departments so you can customize your policy to help mitigate the challenges encountered by these departments.
Look for efficiencies as you document processes
Can you work with vendors more efficiently, such as asking check-paid vendors if they accept ACH or card payments? Are there ways to simplify workflows?
Make it clear and concise
Ask other departments to review drafts to ensure the policies are fair, the document is clear, and that anything confusing or ambiguous is addressed before wider distribution.
Create a Digital Transformation Wishlist
As you examine your invoice and other accounts payable processes to create or update your vendor invoice policy, this is a perfect time to consider if the tools you have truly support your AP department. If your AP staff is buried in manual work and tedious processes, consider if you can better automate and digitize:
A digitally transformed invoice process can make your teams up to 46% more efficient handling invoices. What can automated invoice capture and invoice management do for your organization?
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Invoice data entry
Approval workflows
Document storage
Auditing
Payment processing
Digitizing and automating these processes doesn’t just help your staff save time. The right technology tools can:
Offer more accurate, timelier data analytics
Reduce errors and exceptions
Build in policies to automatically flag potentially noncompliant spend
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Streamline Supplier Payment Processing
When digitally transforming spend management and AP processes, it’s important to include supplier payments. A single interface for managing invoices and ensuring prompt payments creates a seamless experience that speeds up payment processing, as well as helps improve security.
Automation can speed up vendor payments by 13%, reducing late fees and improving supplier relationships.
Did you know?
What can payment automation do for you?
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How much time and money can automating your vendor payments save your organization?
Provide visibility into payments to optimize cash flow and maximize rebate potential.
Schedule payments for optimal timing.
Minimize late fees and build better relationships with suppliers.
Reduce reliance on error-prone, unsecured check payments.
The Benefits of Utilizing a Payment Provider with SAP Concur Solutions
By connecting Concur® Invoice to your preferred payment solutions, you can further streamline your sup plier payment processes. You’ll be able to:
How can utilizing payment providers with Concur Invoice bring more efficiency to your AP department?
Better manage cash flow while leveraging existing bank relationships.
Align your SAP Concur solution with your preferred payment tools.
Track payments from start to finish.
Optimize your payment processes for greater control and visibility.
Improve the Employee Experience
Automated processes will make your AP team’s jobs easier, to be sure. But they can also improve the employee experience throughout the enterprise, reduce stress, and improve morale – a great way to show how AP can contribute to the health of the business. 4 Simple Ways to Improve the Employee Experience
With AP automation, your AP teams can cut the time spent processing an invoice by 75%.
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Concur Invoice fosters appreciation of how the finance office supports the work of other departments.
Concur Invoice fosters appreciation of how the finance office supports the work of other departments. Now, they look at the finance office as more of an enabler, rather than as a chore... They can spend more time doing what they should be doing, rather than on administrative tasks. – Concur Invoice customer
Minimize manual data entry
Who wants to do manual data entry on invoices? Concur Invoice Capture improves invoice turnaround time and puts an end to sorting, scanning, and keying in data from paper invoices.
Integrate p-card transactions
Purchasing card integration, which automatically captures and categorizes transactions, eases work for those submitting expenses and invoices, while improving the accuracy of data and minimizing errors.
Within your Concur® Expense and Concur Invoice solutions, applying controls makes it easy for employees to do the right thing, such as using preferred vendors with negotiated rates or knowing when spend may be over a set limit.
Make compliance easy
Did you know you can run a report called “Mobile Metrics Detail” so you can track adoption trends for the SAP Concur mobile app? By providing training and help, AP can increase mobile app adoption, which in turn eases workloads, enabling employees to submit or approve invoices and expenses whenever and wherever it’s convenient.
Increase mobile app usage
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How can AP automation benefit more than just the AP team?
Our people were familiar with [Concur Expense], they knew how it worked, how to approve...
Our people were familiar with [Concur Expense], they knew how it worked, how to approve, how to use email notifications – everything. All of this helped get people on board [with Concur Invoice] very quickly.” – Nick Sanghvi, Accounts Payable Manager, Simons Foundation
Financial teams
IT managers
All employees
CEOs
Executives will notice improvements that increase employee efficiency, productivity, and happiness, and improve finances through cost savings, compliance improvements, and better controls.
Mobile-friendly tools make submitting and approving invoices and expense reports quick and painless – allowing employees to focus on the jobs they were hired to do.
Cloud-based systems reduce the time that IT spends maintaining and updating software. Vendors like SAP Concur also can provide additional help for user questions and rule setting and configuration.
Concur Invoice can integrate with 50+ ERP and accounting systems. Plus, when you connect more spend into a single system, you’ll get increased visibility into cash flow and reporting that can provide insights to improve the bottom line.
How much can automating invoice save your organization? Find out with our ROI calculator.
Increase Data Insights for Better Strategic Thinking
Identify costs
Compare costs
Manage cash flow
Boost efficiency
What bottlenecks are slowing down your processes?
How are your budgets and future cash flow projections looking based on current and expected expenses? Are you paying your vendors early, late, or on time?
Which vendors do you use most often? Which offer the best deals and with whom can you negotiate discounts?
What are your biggest month-to-month expenditures?
Having the visibility… is allowing us to share the data that we’ve never been able to share before with our directors and our senior execs and give them the information on a month-by-month basis… and that’s going to help us grow and discuss ways we can do more.
When you manage travel, expense, and invoice spend in a single platform, your organization gains a holistic view into spend across the organization. The data insights that come from this automation help the C-suite keep an eye on cash flow, perform long-range planning, and make quick, informed decisions when opportunities arise. Connected data, easy-to-use dashboards, and reporting allows you to:
– Samantha Henton, Finance Manager, Hammerson
Having the visibility… is allowing us to share the data that we’ve never been able to share before...
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Get Real-Time Data Visibility Across the Organization
With a truly connected spend management system, stakeholders across the company have the necessary data insights to make smarter business decisions. Help your finance team and other C-suite leaders:
Understand where the cash is
Real-time insights into company spending lets you spot business trends and make forecasts.
Track progress and target productivity
Generate and distribute standard reports automatically each month so you can spend more time on analysis and less time on data mining.
Gain transparency and proactively deliver action
Each department can access the most relevant reports for them.
Empower teams and improve morale
With more time freed up by AP and finance automation, your teams can dive into the data to uncover insights that lead to organization-wide improvements.
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Take the Next Step
The improvements you make to your AP functions and teams can help them become the strategic powerhouse your organization needs to stay competitive in the coming years and decades. Adding Concur Invoice to your automation toolset is a great first step for saving time and money. Talk to your Customer Account Team to learn how much more you can get from your suite of solutions.
Learn more at www.concur.com
Follow all of SAP Concur
SAP Concur Facilitates Automated Management of Financial Operations How to Improve Cashflow: Top Tips for Finance
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