When organizations plan for the future, manual efforts, inefficient processes and maintaining the status quo are often not what people envision. And yet, when it comes to the accounts payable (AP) function, a lack of investment is standard.
Without the proper investment, AP teams are left to do business as it’s always been done—slowly. Historically, AP hasn’t been a strategic function. Paying bills and processing invoices were simply everyday functions, a necessary part of doing business. As financial operations has grown, and the workload has increased, organizations are discovering the benefits of enabling AP teams with automated tools to help them focus on more strategic, higher value work.
But how do you get to that point?
Building the Business Case
One of the first steps is understanding how your processes are set up. Fragmented processes, or sometimes no processes at all, are what happens when teams are left without the tools they need. Going through the motions, sifting through the paperwork, reporting expenses to the best of their ability based on a combination of cash and accruals—this is the reality of a lot of AP teams. Relying on excel spreadsheets or limited functionality tools like QuickBooks while sending individual emails to follow-up on invoices and approvals is not going to support a growing business.
Simply put, manual work doesn’t scale.
For organizations invested in NetSuite, it can be especially hard to determine what systems need to be developed. But without a full automation suite designed specifically to solve the problems of accounts payable, organizations will continue to be stuck in a spiral of slow, manual work.
Knowing Where to Invest
NetSuite is the top enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform for a reason. It’s endlessly customizable, and can be built to suit vastly different verticals, from biotech to software to manufacturing.
But this all-encompassing focus is also where it can get tricky. Solutions built for general purposes can miss the mark when it comes to ease of use for specific functions, like AP. Without dedicated tools designed specifically for NetSuite’s complexity, AP teams often resort to complicated workarounds in order to accomplish tasks like:
- Accurately onboard vendors via email to avoid business email compromise.
- Capture items like international vendor invoices.
- Manually upload NACHA payment batch files.
- Create spreadsheets to manipulate and upload financial data into their NetSuite instance.
The Hidden Costs of Manual Work
Companies like Abcuro, who were still completing a lot of their AP work in excel before implementing NetSuite and SquareWorks Automate. The investment saw them completely overhaul their processes, and with a solution like Automate that lives directly in NetSuite, tracking their finances entirely inside NetSuite without any third-party connections has made huge impacts, cutting the workload by 50%.
One of the biggest areas of wasted time is moving between systems. For organizations using accounts payable solutions that are not directly integrated into NetSuite, this means a number of issues:
- Employees are being forced to constantly switch between NetSuite, where their financial data lives, and a separate AP system. Reporting from PEGA Systems shows the more an employee has to toggle between applications, the more time is wasted and the more errors increase.
- Organizations keeping their financial data outside of NetSuite are more prone to errors.
- NetSuite cannot report on data in real-time, removing one of the biggest benefits of using NetSuite in the first place.
Organizations keeping their employees trapped in the time-consuming loop of manual work are missing out on the benefits of AP teams doing high-value work. But what is high-value work? Conducting financial analysis and vendor relationship management, such as negotiating better payment terms, is a key area where time spent could result in improved financial outcomes.
Set Your Team Up for Success
It’s nothing new that time = money. But manual accounting doesn’t just mean time; it means wasted time, more errors and lack of insights. Without tracking in place via automation, there are other hidden costs of slow processing: late payment penalties, missed early-payment discounts and even strained vendor relationships.
While NetSuite functionality sets the foundation, it often doesn’t lead to the kind of improvements teams expect to see from such an investment.
The only way to see the kind of huge improvements teams need within the AP function is with automation—namely, a dedicated tool designed to provide the best in AP automation.
