Organizations depend on their finance teams to help them reach their goals. You may be accustomed to your current processes, but there’s a good chance you’re spending too much time on unnecessary routine tasks, taking away from your responsibilities that require decision-making. Accounts payable, for example, is something that can be almost 100 percent automated, so you can spend more time on what matters most.
Here are five simple ways that you can automate your AP.
1. Email Importing
Email is the most universal workplace technology. It makes productive internal and external communication possible and efficient. Vendor communications often happen back and forth through email, making it a central part of accounts payable.
Problems arise when using email for AP, like how to access the information in your inbox. Traditionally, email has involved receiving attachments, downloading them, and uploading them to the location where the rest of your team can access them. This is a slow process and can be made even slower if your attachments get lost in your email.
Automated email importing can stop you from spending all day moving documents from your email to your DMS. You can automatically route your attachments and messages to a predetermined location in your document management system and cut out the middle steps.
2. Centralized Document Storage
Imagine that you need to take a look at one of your vendor contracts. Where is it? You have some documents stored on your computer’s desktop, older ones are in your filing cabinet, and others are stored in your email.
When you automate your document organization, your imported emails and manually uploaded files can be found in a single location. You’ll know exactly where to locate any document regardless of the document type, date, or anything else.
3. Easy Metadata Collection
Skimming the entire document to find a single piece of information (vendor name, date, amount, etc.), can be a serious time drainer.
Revver’s profiles give you a quick overview of the information that your invoices, purchase orders and packing slips contain.
Instead of entering each individual file to skim through, Revver finds a specific dollar amount. Seeing it in the profile, you can use that information for the next step of your AP process.
4. Approvals or Denials
Accounts payable is filled with constant approvals and denials. You might deal with these types of questions daily.
- Is the contract correct?
- Do you agree on the invoice amount?
- Does the packing slip match up with the invoice?
Approval and denials won’t go away. But you want to avoid the time you spend drafting an email that says “looks good” or “needs some work” and routing the file to the right person. With automation technology, you can set up your AP process to send your documentation to a predetermined person where they can approve or deny it with a single click. The document will then be directly routed to whoever needs to take care of the next step.
These workflows can be customized based on dollar amounts, vendor name, or any other information within the document to go to different approvers.
5. Locate Files Effortlessly
In order to create a promising future for your organization, you might get stuck assessing old expense reports. With the much-needed updates that improve your current processes, finding files in your old system often becomes a challenge.
Document management can automatically organize all your files for you—old and new. But if you want to find files even easier, you can use full-text search to find any document, even if it’s been misfiled or the title is misspelled.
Revver is an advanced document management system that not only stores and organizes your files, but can also automate your time-consuming processes. Accounts payable can become simpler than ever. Discover Revver today.
