A detailed guide to overcome Accounts Payable challenges

In today’s dynamic business environment, the efficiency of your Accounts Payable (AP) process can significantly impact your company’s financial health and supplier relationships. However, many organisations grapple with persistent AP obstacles that impede efficiency. The good news is that these challenges can be tackled with a robust tool like BEST reconciliation software. In this blog, I will dissect five common AP obstacles and explain how BEST can be used as a comprehensive solution to solve them.

Tackling the Error-Prone task of Manual Data Entry

Traditional AP processes lean heavily on manual data entry — a time-consuming task with a high risk of human error. Incorrect entries can lead to substantial financial discrepancies and potentially harm supplier relationships.

BEST reconciliation software provides a sophisticated automated matching feature that significantly reduces the need for manual data entry, minimising the risk of human error. By automatically matching invoices and payments, BEST frees up valuable time for your AP team, allowing them to focus on more strategic tasks. In addition, automation enhances productivity and ensures accuracy, instilling confidence in your financial data.

Streamlining the Overwhelming Reconciliation Process

For businesses dealing with high volumes of transactions, reconciling invoices, purchase orders, and payments can seem insurmountable and place pressure on your AP team in terms of timely consolidations and reporting. Let’s be honest, no one likes wasting time by waiting for an inefficient process.

BEST reconciliation software comes to the rescue by automating this process. It swiftly identifies matches and exceptions, making it much easier to spot and address discrepancies. By automating the reconciliation process, BEST saves hours of tedious work and reduces the potential for errors that often accompany manual reconciliation. This allows for more accurate financial reporting and a smoother, more efficient AP process.

Enhancing Real-Time Visibility and Control

Without a centralised system, gaining real-time visibility into your AP process can be challenging. This lack of transparency can often lead to delayed payments, missed discounts, and ineffective cash flow management.

With its seamless integration with SAP, BEST provides a unified platform that offers real-time insights into your AP operations. This means your AP team can better manage due dates, take advantage of early payment discounts, and optimise cash flow. In addition, this level of control can significantly enhance your company’s financial performance, supplier relationships, and growth outlook.

Simplifying the Complex Task of Resolving Exceptions

Resolving exceptions in the AP process can be complex and time-consuming, primarily due to the amount of detail and diligence it demands. For example, discrepancies between purchase orders, invoices, and payments require meticulous investigation and validation to ensure that the financial data is accurate and consistent. In the case where an invoice does not match the corresponding purchase order due to reasons such as incorrect quantities, prices, or tax 

calculations, your AP team must identify the source of the discrepancy and rectify it, which often involves communication with suppliers, reviewing documentation, and updating records. This becomes even more challenging when dealing with high volumes of transactions, as it increases the likelihood of exceptions occurring and the complexity of managing them.

BEST’s exception-handling feature simplifies this task by automatically flagging any exceptions for review. Instead of manually combing through piles of data, the software quickly highlights potential issues, allowing your team to address them promptly, saving time, and ensuring a more accurate and efficient process. In addition, by streamlining the exception resolution process, BEST helps maintain the integrity of your financial data and fosters better relationships with suppliers through timely and accurate payment reconciliations.

Leveraging Data-Driven Insights for Strategic Decisions

Strategic decisions about your AP process, including those made by top management, are often influenced by your company’s broader goals and strategies. For instance, if your company aims to improve cash flow, management might negotiate better payment terms with suppliers or prioritise paying invoices that offer early payment discounts. Conversely, if the focus is on reducing operational costs, the decision might be to automate more aspects of the AP process or identify inefficiencies driving up costs.

BEST’s reporting and analytics features offer valuable, data-driven insights to guide these strategic decisions. It provides a detailed overview of your AP process, highlighting key metrics such as invoice processing times, cost per invoice, exception rates, and more. These insights can help identify bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and areas for improvement. Moreover, BEST can drill down to the SAP transaction level for detailed interrogation, which can be vital when making complex decisions. Moreover, BEST offers superior automated matching capabilities to optimise the time spent on monthly reconciliations. This, along with improved accuracy from standardised system controls, can greatly influence strategic decisions. The solution also provides management reports for overseeing and enhancing reconciliation and month-end functions. These reports provide a data-driven view of your AP operations, which can guide decisions and lead to a more streamlined operation, cost savings, and enhanced financial management

In conclusion, BEST’s reconciliation software is a comprehensive solution that can address the challenges your AP team faces daily. By automating and streamlining the AP process, you can save time and reduce errors while providing the visibility and control needed for effective financial management.

The competitive business landscape we find ourselves in does not allow for ineffective processes, thus leveraging advanced technology is crucial for success. BEST can revolutionise your AP process and elevate your business operations.

If you would like to discover how BEST can optimise your Accounts Payable function, please do not hesitate to reach out to me – Michael.webb@g3g.com. I will be more than happy to show you how you can overcome the obstacles in your finance function.