What is AP Automation | TekStream
What is AP Automation?
By: Marvin Martinez | Senior Developer
A company’s Accounts Payable (AP) process can be very convoluted and complex and, many times ends up turning into a very hectic and all but broken financial process. What is AP Automation? The automation of the AP process can correct many of the typical issues encountered with this financial process while greatly helping to streamline the process overall. A few of the most advantageous AP automation benefits are detailed below.
First, and probably most importantly, AP automation provides a company with a single, centralized solution to ingest and process invoices quickly and efficiently. Rather than dealing with a paper trail, invoices can be emailed in, information extracted, and invoices placed into workflow expeditiously, allowing for quick processing and maximizing those always-welcomed early payment discount options! This is central to what Inspyrus Invoice Automation provides: invoice submission and processing via email, extraction of invoice data, and structured workflow approval.
With streamlined processing, of course, comes powerful monitoring! Implementing AP automation opens up a myriad of powerful monitoring and easy access to frequently used reports and information crucial for accounts payable. With Inspyrus Invoice Automation, in particular, this monitoring is extremely powerful and can give in-depth access to in-flight, completed, and errored invoices with a bevy of available reports, filters, and metrics for analyzation. From high-level organization unit-wide reports to granular visibility into a specific invoice, the right information is only clicks away.
Another feature of AP automation is the ability to automate Purchase Order matching. Does an invoice include a Purchase Order (PO) number? Is that PO a 2-way or 3-way match? With AP automation, these questions can be easily answered by the solution without little need, if any, for manual effort. Streamlined integration with the company’s ERP (such as EBS or JDE) provides this and many other powerful and time-saving features. Inspyrus Invoice Automation integrates with various ERPs, including EBS, JDE, and PeopleSoft, and provides the ability for automated PO matching, even with complex 2-way/3-way determinations.
Finally, AP automation provides a smooth, structured, and consistent approval hierarchy. With routing rules, a structured approval hierarchy including approval limits, and detailed audit trails through an invoice’s processing lifecycle, users of AP automation do not need to worry about processing delays or overly complicated or tedious approval processes. Invoices are automatically routed to the next required approver without placing any additional burden on the current approver than a couple of mouse clicks.
AP automation can provide many benefits to a company, some of which are highlighted here. The Inspyrus Invoice Automation solution delivers these AP automation benefits and many more, offering comprehensive metrics and analytics for reporting, automated PO matching and approval routing, versatile ERP integration, and an intuitive, easy-to-use, yet powerful interface to process invoices effectively and efficiently.
Contact us for more information on automating your invoice processing!