How do you maintain the integrity of your financial transactions today? Do you still rely on your old filling cabinets? Every transaction that is used for financial management reporting should be easily traceable, provide access to dependent and independent related information. Did you know that they don’t have to be stapled together anymore!
When you look at a transaction in your General Ledger for travel expense, can you drill down to the entry that created the transaction, to the reimbursement request or invoice where it originated. Better yet to a specific Purchase Order, Purchase Requisition or Expense Report document that may have preceded the transaction entry including approvals? If you cannot, then you are missing a critical component of modern financial management systems. Those days of hefty filing cabinets have long been gone, yet we continue to see many companies still managing their work flow through paper trails.
Studies show that companies have been known to gain an 80% return on investment in just 18 months, from automating the Accounts Payable process. If you are using a mid-market ERP system, most systems implemented in the 1990’s would not have allowed this automation, and you may very well be still using one of those systems. At the very best, these legacy systems would have required an additional third-party solution whose integration met the needs of the few and not the many.
The Accounts Payable process is a highly likely business process to automate when looking to optimize efficiency, improve cash management and cash flows, increase visibility to stakeholders and eliminate manual tasks. Analyze your processes now, and take steps to automate.
