For an increasing number of consumers, an almost touch free purchase to pay (P2P) process has already become a daily routine. They shop in person or place an order online and pay with a wave of their credit card, their fingerprint or face. Amazon Go stores take this idea even further. They track with beacons and cameras what shoppers take off the shelves and bill you when you walk out of the store.
Now imagine this effortless workflow in a company that has embraced accounts payable automation in their invoice and payment process. A state-of-the-art platform such as Yooz streamlines the P2P Accounts Payable with as little human intervention and oversight as possible. Order invoices make their way through a smart and efficient workflow, starting the moment they are submitted and all the way to the moment they’re paid.
That’s possible thanks to a powerful combination of technology including robotic process automation and deep learning algorithms that capture and understand every invoice and purchase order, route them for approval and eventually just-in-time payment to optimize cost and cash flow.
How Businesses Can Cash in on an Automated Complete P2P Accounts Payable Process
More and more organizations are discovering that with an intelligent accounts payable P2P automation solution, they can provide multiple benefits along their entire purchase to pay process. They can:
- Keep their process transparent
- Improve supplier engagement
- Streamline contract management
- Optimize their inventory and cash flow management
- Create a new revenue stream from a current cost center
At first glance, there’s nothing magical about purchase to pay automation software. It manages the entire process from placing orders with suppliers to settling the bills for these inputs and timely payment. But reality is not as neat as a workflow chart. In fact, most companies still rely on a piecemeal approach where they have automated only parts of their purchase to pay process. As a result, they are missing out on sizable gains in efficiency and productivity.
As market researcher Ardent Partners points out in its “Accounts Payable Metrics that Matter in 2021” eBook, the share of companies that receive invoices electronically keeps rising, now standing at one-third, and the share of payments made electronically is at 57%. That is good to see but most organizations do not have complete purchase to pay process system in place that comprises all the pieces of a successful digital transformation for the AP process.
Three out of four companies Ardent polled rely on document scanning, only one-third offer a vendor self-service portal. What’s encouraging is that the vast majority of companies of all sizes and industries admit that they consider having “smarter systems” for their accounts payable process as “a key to success.” The next step is partnering with an advanced accounts payable automation solution to optimize the entire purchase to pay process.
Minding Your AP Business: Why the Entire Purchase to Pay Process Needs to be Automated
True purchase to pay process automation follows a holistic approach, striving for a straight-through process with ideally close to zero human involvement. Human attention and staff hours are simply too valuable to be spent on things other than solving exceptions and approving invoices for payment. Doing away with opening envelopes, keying in numbers and cutting checks can be a game changer for various reasons, from reducing errors and saving costs to boosting job satisfaction.
Yooz has spent two decades developing and constantly refining an intelligent workflow that starts the second an invoice for an order comes in, regardless of its format. The cloud-based system has indexed more than 100 million invoices from more than one million vendors and learned to understand, word for word, amount for amount, what suppliers bill for and with what templates.
Right out of the box, Yooz will automatically process 80% of all incoming invoices. They are automatically GL-coded, matched with purchase orders and forwarded to the right people for approval. An AP staff only has to come into play when the system has flagged duplicates, erroneous or fraudulent invoices. Additionally, they can review and sign off on any invoice from their mobile device, triggering automatic payment through the payment provider of their choice.
An Intelligent AP Process Lets Every Business Save Big on Time and Money
This type of complete purchase to pay accounts payable automation:
- Cuts processing cost per invoice by 80% or more
- Shortens cycle times from weeks to days, or sometimes mere hours
- Unlocks early pay discounts and other rebates
- Reduces fraud and overpayments
- Saves more than 20% of AP staff’s time since vendor inquiries drop significantly
The accounts payable automation process doesn’t stop once a payment has been initiated. Yooz seamlessly connects with more than 250 leading packages of financial software and ERP systems, from Sage Intacct and Infor to Oracle and Xero. That means invoices aren’t simply matched with purchase orders but also automatically marked as paid -- no more manual exports or time-consuming reconciliation required.
Since all documents are securely stored in the cloud, you can at any point in time search through all documents with keywords as if they consulted a search engine. That kind of AI-powered automation makes the review and audit process a snap and simultaneously cuts down on archiving and storage costs.
With implementing Yooz for purchase to payment process automation, any finance department can quickly optimize its end-to-end game.
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