Accounts payable automation (AP automation) refers to the utilization of software tools to streamline and enhance routine vendor invoice activities. This leads to safer, more efficient, and cost-effective AP operations. Typically, AP automation facilitates digital document handling, invoice management, purchase order alignment, and payment matching. Accounts payable automation helps businesses manage spend and obtain insights to make smarter decisions.
Accounts payable automation allows companies to process supplier invoices without manual intervention, offering a digital workflow to manage steps traditionally overseen by an AP staff member.
Holistic accounts payable automation enables automated start-to-finish business payment processing. This starts with software that captures invoice data in a digital format, usually through a form of scanning or capture method, such as optical character recognition (OCR). The AP system then classifies, matches, and validates data, and forwards to the accounting system or ERP to be processed.
Accounts payable automation can provide significant cost savings for a company beyond the expected savings from eliminating manual tasks. Companies can optimize their vendor portfolio, avoid duplicate or erroneous payments, reduce fraud risk, and take advantage of early payment discounts.
Want to find out how much your company could save with an AP Automation Solution? Try our Savings Calculator. Enter a few figures into our tool to see your potential savings. Compare your metrics against the average Medius customer to see how much you can save. Enter your data for immediate results, or download a custom report.
AP automation software helps make AP departments successful. It enables:
Companies looking to add automation in accounts payable should research different AP automation solutions carefully to ensure the best fit for their organization. It is critical that the accounts payable automation software selected can support all invoice processing use cases required by the business to ensure end to end automation of AP processing and hard savings in time and cost. Learn more about AP Automation.
In addition, it is important to understand how the AP automation software integrates with a company’s ERP to ensure synchronization of data and a streamlined processing. ERP integration makes it possible to transfer master data from the ERP to the AP solution. AP automation solutions generally offer a range of ERP integrations from pre-packaged to fully managed connectors. Learn more about ERP integrations
Here are some tools that might be useful as you explore if an AP Automation solution is right for your business.
Market Guide for AP Automation
If you’re in the market for an accounts payable invoice automation (APIA) tool, this Gartner® report, courtesy of Medius, can help you figure out your best options.
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