Leading AP teams understand the importance of measuring and managing their performance. This involves taking their performance from across the team and looking at how that impacts the finance team as well as the business.
This is a crucial way of identifying what works and what doesn’t work while it can help to streamline processes and ensure that team members are working towards the same goal. Without monitoring, it can lead to a wealth of problems such as duplication, errors, poor time management and processes that are simply unnecessary. So, for an AP team to be successful, managing performance is vital and there are several ways to do this.
Identify Performance Through Metric Analysis
There are many key metrics that can be used to determine how AP teams are performing. This information can raise awareness and help teams to identify their performance strengths but also seek out improvements. The aim should be to consider those metrics that underpin AP teams and so, it’s important to identify potential metrics.
The aim should be to do this while understanding the goal of the company but it’s vital for the team to determine what is considered good performance and what isn’t. Using specialist software, you can determine which metrics you can use and then use those to drive the team. Performance metrics can vary which means that they can include the cost per invoice, the average time to approve an invoice and the number of duplicate payments made each month.
With these metrics, it is then possible to understand how the AP team is performing and then make the necessary changes to make improvements.
Monitoring Performance
Performance is an ongoing thing and it can increase and decrease on a weekly or monthly basis. However, monitoring performance is a crucial element of ensuring the AP team is streamlined and efficient.
Again, this includes using key metrics that enable you to actively monitor performance but they should be published so senior management can also see it from across the business. This is a proactive approach but one that will enable you to provide accurate reporting to stakeholders as a way of showing that your team is performing well. It can also be sent to procurement and audit as this will also show these teams how you are operating and that can help them to understand how you work too.
As AP teams are focused on a wide range of tasks, it makes sense to have the right solutions in place that can help the AP team to grow. With the right metrics and insight, it makes it possible to give the team the right tools to perform better and more effectively. This will make it easier to work with other teams but it will also highlight the crucial role that AP plays within the business. All of this will ensure that your team gets recognised for their efforts and the impact that they have while helping to continually adapt and change at the same time.
