5 mins read

Accounting and Technology

Accounts Payable Technology Plants Virtual Seeds Key to Future Growth

by Yooz the 06.3.2020

accounts-payable-technology_finance-and-technology

Accounting and technology is anything but static. Even though software is an abstraction of human creativity that consists of ones and zeros, it still behaves like a living, breathing thing that evolves over time, according to the needs and wishes of its users. Any system worth its money will start small and get better, more powerful and easier to use over time. At least that’s the vision for accounts payable automation.

 

The Parallels of Accounts Payable Technology and Plants


You can also think of technology as a row of seedlings housed in an experimental garden to see which is best for bearing a particular fruit or flower. This is similar to an organization trying to figure out if AP automation is right for their company and which provider can deliver on their promise of making their lives easier. Some technologies will grow fast yet run the risk of withering. Some are just weeds that threaten to take over the whole lot, while others grow a bit more slowly but still continuously add new leaves, branches or flowers.

These solutions might even bear fruit such as saving its users time and money, boost efficiency and productivity as well as connect enterprises in a better, more meaningful way. Just like a gardener has to take stock of his or her plot, accounts payable teams can and should select and nourish the technologies or individual pieces of software that help them do their job -- and even have some fun with it.

Once your accounts payable department approaches everyday technology from that “green thumb” vantage point, you stand to harvest far more satisfaction and bottom-line benefits than if you just work with a bunch of tools. Take a team working in Accounts Payable. AP clerks have for many years relied on a manual, heavily paper-based process, but they have also seen many new pieces of software sprout that aim to make their and the AP department's job easier. Picking the right ones can prepare an organization for a lush digital future, streamline their purchase to pay process, and prospective growth.

 

CTA-UK-Webinar Replay-AP and ePayable Strategies for Success

 

How does accounts payable software work within your business' garden?


If accounts payable software is a seedling in your business' garden, then the smart technologies that bring it to life act as the roots. A plant's roots support and stores the nutrients it takes in to keep the plant alive and strong. The smart technologies that make up AP software do the same by leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), optical character recognition (OCR), robotic process automation (RPA) and others that will streamline invoice processing.

Optical character recognition, for instance, has facilitated data capture from invoices and purchase orders then converts the information to easy-to-read data to prep it for smart data extraction and traveling to other parts of the system. Another technology that contributes to successful invoice management within the P2P process is robotic process automation or RPA that lets little software bots go to work without human intervention and initiate automatic responses to inquiries from a vendor or customer.

The next promising sprout is machine learning, a subset of artificial intelligence that enables software to mimic the human mind by understanding the concept of an invoice, its contents and the workflow it fits into, from GL coding to approvals and electronic payments.

Even better, the more submissions such systems are fed, the more intelligent they become. The larger their training set, in short, the steeper their learning curve is. AP clerks and managers will only have to step in to handle exceptions, for example to review items flagged as potentially fraudulent or to approve an invoice for payment that magically made its way to their screen. To stick with the gardening scene, such approvals can now be done outdoors, on a mobile device. This accessibility reduces the chance of the invoicing process to be slowed down due to pending approvals or a document that was overlooked.

 

Why the Cloud is Your Company's Soil


Just like your company can still operate without automation, plants can also grow without soil, but they won't be able to grow to their full potential and will have a harder time staying healthy. This is like an organization who still uses paper invoices and physical filing cabinets for their documents or utilize an on-premises system. These methods of invoice processing and storing documents leave AP departments open to security breaches and higher cost caused by handling loose documents. There is a simple solution for accounting and finance leaders who want to equip their accounts payable department from the impact of these obstacles. The cloud.

Like soil, the cloud hosts the entire system with an extra layer of security and gives the automation solution the support it needs to evolve with little to no setbacks. As the AP software goes to work underneath the surface, the cloud is constantly supporting, transferring and exporting what it needs to bear fruit that your company will reap the benefits of over time.


Let Yooz Be the Gardener of Your AP Process


Now, not everyone has a green thumb, as we all know from painful experiences with dead potted plants. But leveraging Yooz's cloud-based, powerful AP Automation solution will become the gardener who does most of the work for your business to help it thrive. We plant the seeds of new technologies, quickly weed out the less promising ones, water and tend to the innovative options, prune them back for optimum usability, graft and bend them the right way so you can get things done exactly the way you want to. And, most importantly, we make sure that what you work with keeps growing in terms of capabilities and reliability.

Like a living garden, AP Automation done right never stops evolving or bearing fruit. That's why Yooz delivers the highest automation rates by industry standards, combined with unrivalled simplicity, to help accounting and finance leaders tackle their productivity and security challenges from purchase to payment. Our AP solution will free your team from tedious, repetitive work and give them the much-deserved freedom to focus on value-added tasks like tending to the relationships with partners and suppliers. We believe that success in this sense is all about planting the seeds, being patient and having more time to smell the roses.

 

CTA-US   Private Demo

    The Smartest Cloud-Based AP Automation Powered by AI: Your Favorite New Co-Worker

    The Smartest Cloud-Based AP Automation Powered by AI: Your Favorite New Co-Worker

    RC_Image_Replay_IA-1

    watch now

    The Smartest Cloud-Based AP Automation Powered by AI: Your Favorite New Co-Worker