Save time in Accounts Payable with these smart strategies

As we say in business, time is money. That’s never truer than in Accounts Payable (AP). We are always on a deadline, whether it’s to pay a supplier, reconcile an invoice, approve a transaction or respond to a supplier query. So how do you get the job done with efficiency? This blog discusses all the ways we could think of to help you save time in Accounts Payable, and reveals a big secret that will save hours.

4 ways to save time in Accounts Payable

The usual strategies

There are some tactics that just work for every office job in every company. Saying no to extra work, delegation of duties to others (particularly those with extra time on their hands), avoiding unnecessary meetings, not juggling too much at once. These are the standard when it comes to advice on saving time, and they’re commonplace if you do a simple google search.

So, we’re going to focus on some of the ones that are really going to make a difference in AP:

Are you alert at 9:48am?

Every person will have ups and downs in concentration through the day. Learn to complete less taxing tasks during down time and more difficult tasks during a high-focus period. As a team, try not to have meetings in the mid-afternoon, as this time is likely to hit most people’s slump periods and be unproductive. Interestingly, according to research by Tic Watches, Accounts professionals ‘feel most productive in the morning at 9:48am’. So, a task that needs optimum productivity or concentration should be completed in the morning. Perhaps resolving PO issues or checking for transaction errors?

Group your tasks to work with efficiency

Group tasks to make them easier to deal with. This counts individually and amongst the whole department, as individuals could be tasked with specific elements of the AP process to focus on. Many of us function more effectively when we concentrate on a single task, rather than multitasking. When multitasking, we bite of small chunks of many tasks, and this can often lead to a state of stress as we try to do too much at once. Sink into a calm, focused mindset and work through one task at a time. Working through a batch of similar tasks can help you get better results.

An example of where this can work might be making payments. Focus on making payments to the suppliers first and foremost. If you hit a snag, make a note and file that away for after your batch is complete. You should end up with a group of paid suppliers, and a list of suppliers with issues which you can then focus on resolving.

You could also categorise them into smaller batches. If you have 100 statements to reconcile, you may begin with the first 20 that signify the highest priority and then work in batches of 20 down the priority order. This priority could be based on suppliers that are the most integral to the functionality of your organisation, from a quantity or spend perspective.

Stop retroactive actions

A smart way to reduce your workload is to prevent it. While many of us can pre-empt if a meeting is necessary or not, it can be difficult to judge the rest of our work. With Accounts Payable though, there’s a large area which can really save time and money. Retroactive work. By this, we mean recovering duplicate payments and overpayments, the leg work required to fix an underpayment, the back and forth between yourself and the supplier, the stress of a payment to a fraudster going through and trying to recoup that whilst also paying the supplier who gave you the goods.

To prevent this, you need to create high accuracy within your ledger on the first try, before the payment run. We know intensive manual checks also take up time, so we suggest that you embrace technology here. Invest in software that interrogates your data to find any exceptions and duplicate invoices as soon as they appear in your ERP.

Work at scale and reclaim your time

We’ve talked about batching tasks, but we haven’t looked at using technology to automate them.

There are a few common areas we can talk about where digitisation and automation can be a huge help. Invoice entry into the ERP itself is a good example, whether that’s by utilising an email inbox or having a full supplier portal where vendors can submit their invoices. Another may be payment, once the invoice is checked and approved.

However, there are a couple of areas that we know are often neglected because although it’s great to have, the cost versus reward isn’t there when completed manually. Stringent transaction checks, and statement reconciliation. Instead of completing these at scale, which in some companies can become a full-time job, we tend to spot check, or complete the most important, and that means that we inevitably miss things. Accounts Payable software can help with that.

Let’s talk about Statement Reconciliation. Did you know that on average, we spend half an hour manually reconciling a supplier statement? As a result, it’s so resource-heavy and time-consuming that often we choose to reconcile only our top suppliers according to spend. However we all know that there are bound to be so many more missed credit notes, rebates, discounts and duplicate invoices beyond those few suppliers that we’re missing out on.

So, what if you had software that sourced your ERP data and statements for you, matched them to the supplier and then identified discrepancies and duplicates? We asked our team to test our Automated Statement Reconciliation Software and found that they gained 12x their efficiency. They were able to find discrepancies with ease and utilise their time to investigate them and recover funds.

But prevention is better than cure. Instead, you could save recovery time and costs preventing overpayments at the source. Software catering to overpayment protection (like ours) analyses your transaction data to find errors, duplicate invoice and potential fraud. Designed to be used before the payment run, if these exceptions are resolved, it prevents the need for any recovery audit.