Controllers Council recently held a roundtable panel discussion entitled Accounts Payable Outlook: What to Expect in 2025 and Beyond, sponsored by Esker.
Our expert panelists were Kristine Dosick Controller at evolvedMD, Michael Mance, VP Financial Operations at Dialysis Care Center, and Jody Derr, Source-to-Pay Business Manager at Esker.
Following are key takeaways to this discussion. If you are interested in learning more, view the full webinar archive video here.
What types of fraud are you most concerned about in 2025?
Jody: I think the answer here is all. It’s just it comes down to the likelihood and the impact and how that can vary. And that depends on a company size, the industry, their own digital maturity. These attackers can be convincing, and they are becoming more tech savvy. I think everyone is seeing an uptick on the business side, even on the personal side. AI deepfakes are still an emerging area, but having awareness in that area is just as important.
Kristine: Every kind of fraud is a concern, but my greatest level of concern is the type of fraud that I see the least, because I have the least amount of experience with it, and that would be things that are related to AI, and let’s say voice recognition spoofing are my greatest point of concern because especially right now, we rely fairly heavily on voice-to-voice confirmation or account information, ACH information, anything where there’s going to be a transfer of funds.
Michael: The phishing really is where it’s a fictitious email and there will be a letter or character that’s different from the initial vendor. And what we’ve seen is them changing their banking information. Also, the check fraud, which, that’s mostly maintained by our financial institution, and we don’t write a lot of checks. But the invoicing is rather common, whether it’s in business or personally, you see a lot of that nowadays. But we have a very good internal controls and approval process.
What actions has your AP department taken to reduce fraud risk?
Michael: We have a more comprehensive review of the invoices as they’ve come in. We call the vendor directly. Then on the approval process, we have multiple layers by dollar threshold. So that goes all the way up to me and to the CEO. And then the Treasury Department and Controller also take a thorough look at the payments prior to releasing them as well.
Kristine: We also try to look at every endpoint of risk, starting with a comprehensive IT training and ongoing testing of our systems. We also are removing as much as possible any paper transactions, moving everything to electronically issued transactions, doing vendor verification, having previous information verified, having a complete invoice verification process, and then multiple review points before payments are issued. As we grow, that’s one of our priorities to look into more automation.
Jody: I think one of the biggest ones that I hear in talking with other clients is having approvals, especially for any supplier data changes to reduce risks. Having systems in place gives you the standardization of what is needed, like a checklist to ensure that risk is really reduced.
Is your AP department using automation or AI in any applications? If yes, what applications?
Michael: We are leveraging our ERP system from an automation perspective. I am currently looking at AI functionality for specific applications. I know there’s a lot of vendors out there, a lot of competition, but that’s something on my plate for the current year. But mostly the automation is driven by our internal processes within our ERP system.
Kristine: We have incredibly limited automation currently based on some of the limitations of our ERP, which is one of the reasons that we’re looking to potentially make an ERP change so that we can take advantage of not only automation, but a greater integration ability with other systems that we use in our operations. And we are also looking to explore how we can use AI to enhance our AP functionality and to take some of the routine mundane tasks from our AP staff so that they can focus on the higher level, more important verifications.
What are some of the most impactful uses of AI in the accounts payable process?
Jody: Some of the things that really gets me excited is what I’m seeing now for predictive coding and late payment predictions. But I would still say that with the amount of time that it can take just simply to enter an invoice, I think the data capture is still my number one most impactful use. There are multiple layers of technology that can be used. For those out there who may think that they have AI because they’ve got templates that are using OCR, that’s not what I’m talking about. Technologies, like first time recognition and that being able to bounce the data from your source of truth, your ERP, that master data, the auto learning, the touchless processing. I don’t think that there’s really anything that could be more tedious than manually keying in the invoices.
There’s a lot of solutions out there. You can build it, you can buy it, you can outsource it. But the best thing that you can do for your organization when looking at automation is to remove the manual touch points and go with this “human led” AI transformation that allows them to really level up their day-to-day processes. It takes so much time, which can delay payment processing. It takes away the resources away from more strategic tasks.
What supplier management tools are you using? And how does your company manage data security?
To view these questions, download the full webinar here.
ABOUT THE SPONSOR:
Esker is a global cloud platform built to unlock strategic value for finance, procurement, and customer service professionals and strengthen collaboration between companies by automating the cash conversion cycle. Founded in 1985, Esker operates in North America, Latin America, Europe, and Asia Pacific with global headquarters in Lyon, France, and US headquarters in Madison, Wisconsin. Visit https://www.esker.com/ to learn more.
