Controllers are asked to do more than ever. Whether that’s a move into operations, a requirement that you take over the HR side of business, or simply the management of financial processes, it’s harder than ever to keep up with the day to day responsibilities of your job. Added to this, growing companies have it even harder—because not only is it more diverse work, it’s more work.
Visibility, Control, and Scalability: The Benefits of AP Automation
Imagine you have to deal with 500 transactions a month. Now imagine that number doubling. Now imagine having ten times the transactions. How much more work will that require? How much more time will that take? If you said ten times the work, you’re either planning on hiring or spending a few late nights at the office. But why? There’s a better way, and a recent whitepaper from Controllers Council sponsor Bill.com shows you how.
In their free guide titled Visibility, Control, and Scalability, the Bill.com team partnered with the Institute of Finance and Management to research how nearly 400 AP departments ran their processes. The results were not surprising—many businesses took an unfortunate amount of time to do the job and those who were able to automate accomplished more and did so in less time.
Poised for Growth: How to Scale up Your AP Process
Though the entire whitepaper explores the importance of visibility, control, and scalability, we would like to explore the last of these three and discuss how you can expand your process without seeing your budget expand alongside it.
Even though the pandemic might have slowed down growth for some, companies are ramping up for a recovery. Hiring is taking off, customers are shopping, and many are expecting their businesses to start ramping up.
If your organization is poised for growth, your payments processes should be able to grow with it. Again, the last thing you want to do is to see ten times the work when you process ten times the transactions, meaning that scalable automation should be a top priority. However, what goes into scalability? It starts with compatibility and flexibility.
Growing without Growing Pains: Why Scalability and Compatibility are Intertwined
Scalability and compatibility with your other systems are critical considerations. One thing you’ll want to avoid is having to replace your solution with something more robust if your business outpaces its capacity or if you switch up ERPs. The smart move is to plan and choose something that can handle the additional work as you grow and has the flexibility to interface seamlessly with many ERP systems should you need to make a change.
From here, many businesses realize that the cloud can help them achieve this. Built on integration and easy updates, the cloud empowers growth without growing pains.
By using a solution that’s cloud-based (often known as software-as-a-service, or SaaS), companies not only gain the ability to streamline processes, they gain technological advancement that a manual, paper or spreadsheet-based process can’t deliver.
Flexibility Gives You Freedom to Evolve
Alongside the growth in transactions, you likely will need to adapt workflows alongside your growing business. New hires, new workflows, and even new departments might present new challenges, meaning that flexibility is critical. With growth, your workflows may also change in other ways. You may add a layer of approvals or impose approval limits by title.
In turn, the right solution, according to the IOFM research, can connect to these processes and make it easier to pivot your processes without extra training or headaches.
Get the Guide: Visibility, Control, and Scalability: Benefits of Automating AP Processes
Automation can help your organization grow and thrive while reducing manual labor and the potential for fraud and errors. But first, you must find a solution that will work for you—now, and as your business grows—so that you can fully turn your attention to making that happen. The entire guide from Controllers Council sponsor Bill.com explores the costs that normally are associated with growth and the reasons that automation can help.
Visibility, Control and Scalability: Why AP Teams Should Automate Now explores a variety of benefits for AP automation and discusses how small-to-medium organizations can solve the unique challenges they face without having to adopt a complex enterprise AP solution. Download this guide now.
Automation and security are so important when it comes AP flow. Fraud is becoming more prevalent and checks will eventually be a thing of the past. In fact, some estimates are that over $18B is lost every year to fraud.
When checks need to be written you can still automate the process with just a few clicks of a button and the checks get dispersed. This also makes the process much cleaner as checks no longer need to be printed, signed, placed in envelope, and mailed.
You can also monetize your AP by offering a virtual CC (more secure than ACH) and generate rebates literally every time you pay your bills.