The Rethink: Easy ways technology may evolve your business 2023

Companies from coast to coast are still filing expense reports, tracking trips, and payments, looking through receipts and pursuing details using handwritten notes, spreadsheets, and email despite the arrival of modern business tools.

With the use of technology, automating invoice management may automate end-to-end operations, improve cash flow management, and provide access to Accounts Payable activities from anywhere. Organizations may utilize electronic invoice processing to increase productivity, monitor and approve bills from anywhere, and promptly transmit requests to approvers via customized processes to digitize paper invoices and standardize records with the use of technology. As per SAP Concur, 153,000 duplicate payments were avoided (weekly), 5 days average time from invoice capture to pay, $17B processed transactions monthly and 1.85M invoices handled monthly. Optimising Accounts Payable will help the firm prosper in the following ways:

Improve precision and simplify workflows:
Using optical character recognition (OCR), machine learning, and human verification, the data extracted from invoices are accurate and devoid of errors. Invoice data of all sorts can also be maintained in the digital file cabinet for many years with permission-controlled access for corporate workers.

With predefined constraints (cost item coding, dollar thresholds, exceptions, match or mismatch, non-PO), solutions guarantee an optimal workflow and reduce data input processing times. Automating the matching process to current purchase orders allows participating parties to focus on error analysis and decision-making.

Get a better understanding of cash flows:
Travel solutions offer a uniform, user-friendly experience for workers and comprehensive reporting of travel, expenditure, and Accounts Payable solutions for finance executives in a single, integrated spend management platform. Businesses may manage unsubmitted bills and approvals in real time, correlating them with automated audit trails to help decrease bottlenecks and increase responsibility. The usage data for headcount planning techniques by offering AP executives the information to grow and reallocate resources as the business develops.

Facilitate reporting and audits: Using pre-built and custom audit rules contributes to the improvement of internal controls across the invoice life cycle. Mark duplicate invoices, unauthorized vendors, and code standards that are lacking. Configure custom flags to assist prevent costly errors and limit possible fraud. In addition to pre-built reports (accrual, aging, vendor expenditure) and bespoke reports that can be generated automatically and emailed directly to selected contacts, organizations may receive near real-time visibility into their cash flow.

Conclusion
Due to the difficulty of achieving revenue growth, firms must lower expenses and better control discretionary spending. Manual and semi-automated invoice processing and disbursements are a solid starting point, but firms spend more than necessary to process invoices and make payments to suppliers. Profit margins are further eroded by ineffective expenditure management. Integrating all spending with a single automated system for invoice and expense processing and disbursements saves expenses and enhances spend management, better positions firms to prosper, regardless of the economic situation.