Eliminate Waste With Virtual Payment Automation

Inefficiencies in your accounts payable process can be pretty detrimental to any business. You can waste your resources and even hamper your supplier relationships due to late payments. In addition, accounts payable hiccups can lead to inaccurate cash flow predictions, which is true for 56% of businesses.

Virtual payment automation is the way to counter the challenges experienced by accounts payable departments. Eliminating manual processes can boost productivity and which is true for 56% of businesses. Plus, you can reduce your processing costs by 81%.

Let’s find out how you can achieve virtual payment automation for your business.

Adopt Invoice Automation

The accounts payable department wastes countless precious hours in collecting and matching invoices. Suppliers send in invoices that need to be verified and sent for approvals. Then you have to pay your supplier and update your books.

According to Business Insider, the whole process can take 30 to 90 days.

However, businesses can expedite processing cycles by using receipt automation. 

An invoice automation tool can collect receipts in different formats and match them with the right transactions. Many tools also use optical character recognition (OCR) to collect data from invoices and accounting.

As a result, your finance team can save time, effort, and focus on being productive.

Streamline Approvals

47% of businesses still rely on manual approval processes, as per Business Insider. The process is full of inefficiencies and wastes everybody’s time. Manual approval also lengthens your processing cycles and leads to late payments.

Virtual payment automation can bring the advantage of pre-approvals and spending limits. You can set up rules and fix amounts for recurring payments like software subscriptions. The approach lets you free up your resources and streamlines workflow related to regular payments.

In addition, you can even set vendor locks and custom expiry dates for full control of your spending.

Centralize Payments 

Businesses pay for products and suppliers in many ways. According to Business Insider, 49% of accounts payable payments are made in checks. Organizations may also use ACH or bank transfers to pay for services and vendors.

You should look to centralize your payments to make the most of your payment automation. We suggest getting rid of paper checks to speed up your payments and improve supplier relationships. Additionally, use a single source to pay your suppliers to streamline your workflow.

Businesses can even go for virtual corporate cards to pay vendors. These cards let you define budgets, expiry dates, and the amount your departments can spend. Plus, you can also set how many times the cards can be used.

Your accounts payable department will find it easy to track payments made from a single source. Best of all, you can automate the whole process and eliminate the need for human intervention.

Aim for a Connected Accounting Ecosystem

Businesses can achieve complete automation by creating a connected ecosystem of financial apps. You should integrate your accounting software with any payments tool you use. For example, you should sync your accounting solution with your invoice automation tool to automate bookkeeping.

Organizations will be able to get rid of most repetitive tasks and free up accountants tied in laborious processes. In addition, your accounts payable processes will speed up and leave no room for inaccuracies like duplicate payments.

You can also develop real-time visibility into your cash flow and determine your financial status on the spot. There is no need to wait for months to make predictions about your cash flow.

Plus, you can also drive insights and make informed decisions for business success.

Final Thoughts

80% of accounts payable clerks believe technology is a requisite to perform their responsibilities. Therefore, you will only be holding back your growth by forcing your accountants to do manual tasks. The way to surge ahead is to adopt virtual payment automation for accounts payable.

You will find ample tools in the market to automate your approvals and payments. They can help you automate each step of your accounts payable process to save time and effort. You can also develop complete visibility into your spending and gain full control of your financials.

Be sure to choose a reliable solution like Mesh to streamline your workflow and payments. We will help you improve your supplier relationships and achieve business growth.

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