Accounts Payable and Expense Report automation

Sometimes nothing changes in the accounting department – sometimes the personnel makeup of the team doesn’t like change.  But change-is-a-comin’ in the world of expense capture and payment. We don’t want your head to be in the sand.

There are varying degrees of Accounts Payable (AP) and Expense Report automation. Here are a few examples:

• Auto-feeding credit card charges into your accounting system 
• Allowing employees to do their expense report in the cloud with mobile images
• Electronically storing vendor bills and approval capture 
• Paying vendors electronically – no more check signing

I hope you are using or looking into using one of these options.

Accountants may be the first to raise a critical eye to automation since online tools likely get fewer careful reviews of the details of an invoice for approval; but we aren’t sure that the CEO looks at all the backup either when he/she is signing checks. All we are saying is that it’s worth considering.

Here are a few of the pretty cool outcomes of this process: 

• Paper reduction.  Imagine that you open the mail and upload it to your AP automation tool and then throw away the paper? 
• Approval workflows.  Get the bills approved by the same person as last time, add multiple layers of approval, and send notification to multiple parties of each step along the way. 
• Receipt capture with your mobile device.  Finish dinner, write a note on the receipt, take a picture of it in the mobile app, and once a week accumulate your expense report. 
• Credit card integration. Auto-feeding of your personal and/or business cards will keep you from forgetting a charge. 
• Automated Synchronization with your accounting system.  Features exist for this to work while you sleep.

Before jumping in, definitely do your research. With a number of tools on the market, it’s worth learning what each one does and does not do. Also, work with your team to determine which tool will be effective for your company.  With a little bit of education and planning, automation may be the right tool for you.

One word of caution for CEOs and Accountants out there who think they will save time and people by moving toward automation — while it’s a step in the right direction, it’s not likely to save your accounting team much time, but it makes their time more valuable. By automating some key steps in the process, the accounting team can spend more time on analysis, research, and adding value for your organization. Like I said before, if you aren’t considering automation—you’re missing out!