Navigating New Software with Ease: The Top 3 Ways AP Automation Simplifies Onboarding
Deploying a new software solution within your business can be intimidating and disruptive to everyday workflows. While the benefits may be clear, investing the time and effort into learning a new solution while still completing your day-to-day tasks can be exhausting – and even a bit irritating – both for you and your employees.
Business automation is designed to make your working life easier, which applies to learning the new solution, too. In this article, we will explore 3 ways onboarding staff is easier with AP automation.
Streamlining Workflows Reduces Errors
Let’s start with onboarding new team members: the process becomes much smoother when they’re not drowning in decisions about how to properly process a pile of invoices. Each business unit, from headquarters to subsidiaries to branches, may have differing processing rules. Keeping up with all those rules — and exceptions to those rules — can be overwhelming. And when mistakes creep in, it’s usually because someone made a wrong call somewhere along the line.
By streamlining workflows, you ensure that everyone is following the proper steps, which helps guide your team through the invoice processing process with ease since the burden of identifying that a fork in the road lies ahead and deciding which path to take is offloaded from the employee. Instead, a smart AP automation solution steers each invoice down the right path.
Removes the Guesswork from Routing
When approval is required or when a processing discrepancy arises, determining who to route that invoice to for action can be challenging. For example, if the invoice price doesn’t match the purchase order price, the purchasing party may need to intervene.
Unfortunately, however, identifying who that party actually is can be a cumbersome task in and of itself. The finance team may have to turn to the ERP to seek out the purchaser based upon the vendor address or the bill to location. From there, they may have to make another leap from the ERP to an employee directory to try and find the right person for that location.
And when you throw in extra variables, like freight invoices or project-specific bills, the process gets even more complicated. Often, the finance team ends up choosing someone who seems “good enough” and hopes that the invoice ends up in the right hands.
This is where AP automation shines. With rules-based routing, invoices automatically find their way to the right person, which eliminates the headache of manual routing.
Boosts Accuracy and Eliminates the Need for Memorization
Simple data errors can turn into costly mistakes if not corrected quickly. Keying in a wrong value may send the invoice through unnecessary steps, leading to longer processing times and the potential to miss out on cost saving discounts. Some errors may even result in late payment fees or duplicate payments. Most finance teams are acutely aware of the impacts of processing errors and though vigilant, people are still people and make mistakes.
New team members spend a significant amount of time memorizing values such as vendor numbers and GL codes as well as keying these values in while processing invoices. This need to memorize data can be eliminated entirely with an intelligent AP automation solution that is integrated with your ERP. New team members can look up these values with a few short keystrokes and have peace of mind knowing that the values were retrieved straight from the ERP – eliminating data entry errors and the need to memorize.
Simple data errors can lead to costly mistakes, like unnecessary delays or missed discounts, and in some cases, late fees or double payments. Despite everyone’s best efforts, mistakes happen.
New team members often spend a lot of time memorizing vendor numbers and GL codes, not to mention, manually entering them. But with an intelligent AP automation system that integrates with your ERP, this need to memorize data can be eliminated entirely. Quick keystrokes pull up the right data, which eliminates data entry errors, as well as the need for memorization.
Conclusion
Whether you’re an experienced employee transitioning to an automated AP system or someone who is just starting out, you can get up to speed quickly with an automated AP solution. You will spend less time learning the processing flow and all of its potential paths and won’t have to memorize vendor numbers and general ledger codes or where employees are located for routing purposes.
Learning the solution becomes much easier when you can focus on a narrower scope and skip the memorization marathon. This way, you’ll move faster and more confidently, which in turn will make the entire onboarding process much more seamless and streamlined.