When a company starts to grow and increase its amount of business, it pays special attention to its production and customer service departments to meet this increase in demand. However, often not enough attention is paid to the evolution that the company's AP department experiences during the accounts payable process, limiting the strategy to increasing the number of employees in this department.
Accounts payable process
But as the invoice volume increases and due to the dimensions of the personnel structure that needs to manage, validate and execute the different phases of the process, the complexity can become one of the worst enemies of the Accounts Payable professionals and by extension, the rest of the company.
“Less is more”, and in the AP area, simplicity and clarity are fundamental so that everything flows conveniently.
Accounts Payable process: 4 Steps towards simplicity
There is a group of concepts that should be present at all times in the day to day of Accounts Payable, and once they start to function and a permanent cycle is established and present in a constant form, the whole AP department benefits from a cleaner and more efficient process.
1. Defining objectives
Starting with basic objectives and going deeper into the design of how we would like the accounts payable process to flow, is a fundamental step for the rest of the steps we are gong to take. It is good to depend on specialists in the subject, and we should not forget that this is something dynamic, that are modified and adapted over time towards a better constant.
.2. Identifying key data
The ability to measure and extract information about what is happening in the Accounts Payable process is one of the strengths of the process. Simplifying the collection of this data and reducing it to two or three key variables, providing context or also setting target values for them, will be the way to make it clear to those responsible for the department the direction in which all their actions should be aimed.
3. Process automation
Many companies still do not know much about the benefits of Accounts Payable process automation, but those which have already incorporated systems which resolve workflows in seconds, when it previously took more than a week to do it manually, understand the competitive advantage that is implied by adopting automation to improve the department performance.
4. Control
Having the right Accounts Payable tool that allows you to act on the master variables of each accounts payable process and automatically resolves the complexity that arises from the relationships between them is the true future value that the company should pursue in terms of improving AP tasks.
These four steps close the circle that governs the complete AP department procedure, periodically and continually. When you want to adjust one factor or implement an improvement, we have to implant them in the accounts payable process , not to run them in parallel. They have to be configured in the core of the automation, even if these means an effort or a few hours of technical shutdown. But to have everything integrated, will allow the process to continue to be easy and quick. To continue adding parallel processes and patches to the processes, adds complexity and leads to a loss of efficiency, something so valuable for the modern company.
