So often, downstream processes are forgotten when organizations update their workflow models. That often means that important areas – like Accounts Payable – are still manually managed, and the AP team remains buried under a sea of paper invoices that must be matched, verified, reconciled and eventually paid. (Kiss those early payment discounts goodbye!) With these burdensome manual tasks, the losers are savings and accuracy. From a stack of paper, it’s almost impossible to see what’s been received, correct prices versus invoice price, and what’s on backorder and shouldn’t yet be paid.
But you can hit reset on this entire process. Get off paper and onto online 3-way price matching, receiving, and backorder management, topped off with an accurate payment process.
Start paying the right price for the right product, and reduce the paper pile. Here’s how:
1. Use General Ledger (GL) codes to drive better analytics
• When you add GL codes to your item master, they’ll pre-populate onto POs and flow through to invoices
• It’s a way to avoid double-keying and you’ll improve visibility to spend across product categories
2. Approve POs, not invoices!
• Move approvals to the front-end by approving POs before submitting to vendors
• Team up materials management and AP to solve price variances and set tolerance that allows orders and invoices to flow right through your organization with little manual intervention
• Invoices on approved POs flow right into payment processing (Best Practice Tip: Receiving items into your organization adds another degree of accuracy to invoice payment)
3. Leverage 3-way price matches to support fully automated processing and accurate payment
• Make sure all capable vendors send an electronic invoice (810)
• Send all POs electronically to vendors
• Envi will match invoices against receiving and PO data, ensuring correct quantities and pricing
4. Activate interfaces
• Integrate your AP system with Envi
• The interface will enable key data elements to flow between systems
• You’ll reduce double-keying and set the stage for greater automation resulting in less manual work
When you automate AP processes, your entire organization wins. You open the door to both hard dollar and labor savings, reduce double-keying and manual data entry, ensure you’re pay for accurate products you’ve actually received, and streamline with 3-way price matching to pay correct contract prices.
Click here to read more about AP Best Practices.
