AP Automation Is About Future-Proofing Your Business

None of us knows what the future holds, but there are a few near certainties. That’s particularly true in the realm of accounts payable (AP), where we can feel quite confident that advanced automation and streamlining processes are the next step in AP’s evolution. 

Why are we confident about that outcome? Because automation has matured, the benefits are proven, and its future utility is obvious. Businesses may cling to outdated modalities like paper checks for any number of reasons but make no mistake: executives want automation solutions for invoices and payments. They need partners with decades of experience to actualize process efficiencies, reductions in cost and staff time, and to improve their fraud risk exposure.  

The writing is on the screen: the future of payments and financial services will be thoroughly automated. Much of it already is. Hesitation and a lack of adoption are the only significant barriers to creating more manageable, profitable businesses using financial automation coupled with digital payments. 

Long-term concerns, short-term costs 

For many, putting off automation projects can seem like a good business decision. If you have a tried-and-true method of processing invoices and paying suppliers that everyone in the organization is accustomed to, shaking that up in the hopes of future gains can feel like a surefire way to frustrate your staff and strain your budget. 

However, those immediate concerns are short-lived and often less consequential than first believed. Businesses need to live up to their promise of long-term vision and planning. An immediate expense that creates not just efficiency, but also legitimate cost savings and new revenue, is an extremely worthwhile investment.  

To better understand how that works, it’s important to know what ‘automating’ means for accounts payable. By shifting away from checks, several payment process steps are streamlined or eliminated, and the hard costs of issuing checks (estimated by Ardent Partners to be $9.47 per payment) drop off the P&L.  

Invoicing has similar concerns, but the hard costs of paper processing and the lengthy processing time are even more significant.  

At the same time, payment types like virtual card and Bottomline’s Premium ACH offer significant rebate potential, offsetting any initial expenses and creating a way for finance to operate in the black over the long haul.  

There is also the not-so-small matter of staff time and happiness.  

Whether you realize it or not, your staff hears the chatter about artificial intelligence and fret about whether it will affect their jobs. There has been recent pushback from Goldman Sachs and other giants in the investing industry as to whether AI will reach those heights, of course.  

The paradox is that automation is a better way to ensure your staff creates value and feels more secure in the skilled cognitive work humans do best. Automating basic tasks that AI may someday soon be able to handle and allowing team members to focus on big-picture business priorities makes them more useful and satisfied than they otherwise would be. 

Why automation truly does future-proof the business  

As alluded to above, automation does wonders in taking slow, clunky, error-prone processes out of the picture. That makes for more satisfied, more valuable employees within the finance team who can focus on projects with significant goals and gains for the larger business. As your organization becomes comfortable with the technology, the benefits of invoice and payment automation will start to appear. 

But this article is really concerned with the world of tomorrow and future-proofing the business as a core feature of automation, not an add-on. We can’t be sure what economic upheaval or global challenges await us, but we can be sure that agile, efficient businesses that can keep costs down will thrive.  

Automation sets businesses up to weather future troubles and thrive in growth opportunities. If AI takes off, it will alleviate unnecessary tasks for AP, creating a leaner team where responsibilities are significantly re-configured. Automating core finance processes is a start in that direction. Suppose budgets are strained because of shifts in the global economy. In that case, the reductions in material costs and process expenses you’ve achieved through automation may put you ahead of other business functions.  

As real-time payments gain broader adoption and usage in the United States the way they have in Europe and Asia, your familiarity with faster processing and digital payment types gives your organization a leg up on adoption. If a new type of fraud crops up that targets check payments or unsecured invoices, you have a secure, digital solution that mitigates that risk. And so on. 

The threads running through these scenarios concern agility and readiness. Businesses working with clunky, time-and-paper-heavy invoice and payment processes cannot turn on a dime to face a new challenge, necessitating costly and time-consuming changes in a timeframe and at an expense the organization may not be able to handle. Finance functions that have started streamlining core processes will be better able to handle the next challenges and opportunities, regardless of what they may be.  

Automating AP today brings immediate, clear benefits for the entire organization. The value it creates by effectively future-proofing your invoice and payment processes allow you to handle unexpected challenges not yet on the radar, which is one of the prime benefits.