Procurement and Purchasing
4 min read
Are manual payment processes dragging down your AP team’s productivity and efficiency?
One of the highest ROI moves your team can make is to adopt payment automation, a powerful tool that can transform your payable department. Payment automation uses advanced technology to streamline the accounts payable (AP) process, reducing time-consuming tasks and minimizing errors.
In this guide, we will explore the benefits of payment automation, how it works, the essential features to look for in an automation solution, and how Zip can empower your AP department to achieve its best work.
Payment automation involves the use of automated systems to manage the entire payment process from invoice receipt to payment execution. In modern finance, accounts payable automation can reduce human error, increase efficiency, and ensure compliance with regulatory standards.
By adopting AP automation software, organizations can save time, reduce late payments, and gain better control over their cash flow.
Payment automation can empower AP and finance teams to save incredible amounts of time and money, while also reducing or eliminating the errors that come from manual processes. Here is just a selection of the work payment automation can take off your plate.
Payment automation begins with the electronic receipt and capture of invoices. Technologies such as the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) embedded in Zip AI can be used to extract data from paper invoices and electronic formats.
This seemingly magic technology can help ensure that all invoice data is accurately entered into the system without manual data entry, reducing human error and processing costs.
Automated systems perform checks to validate invoice data, ensuring accuracy and completeness. Matching invoices with purchase orders and receipts can be done with a single click, helping to prevent duplicate payments and other discrepancies.
With invoice automation powering your procurement, invoices are automatically routed to the appropriate approvers based on predefined criteria. Ensuring key stakeholders—and AP staff—are notified of next actions can reduce bottlenecks, and keep everything visible in dashboards.
These are incredible time and cost-saving workflows which can help in avoiding late fees, but also taking advantage of potential early payment discounts. Procurement orchestrated is procurement accelerated.
With automation, electronic payments can be scheduled according to criteria like due dates and discounts. Batch processing of vendor payments further increases efficiency, allowing the AP department to manage multiple transactions simultaneously.
Automated systems execute payments through various methods, such as ACH, wire transfers, and virtual cards. Real-time updates and confirmations of payment status are provided, giving finance teams better visibility of routing and control over the payment process—and the bottom line.
Modern procurement orchestration platforms offer full integration with ERP and accounting systems, to ensure data synchronization and consistency across all financial records. Fully orchestrated integrations can eliminate manual data entry, and can save your IT team major headaches manually coordinating cloud-based tools.
Continuous monitoring of payment statuses allows for real-time tracking across the entire accounts payable process. Automation helps handle exceptions and discrepancies efficiently, ensuring smooth payment workflows for everyone involved.
Automated payment systems ensure adherence to regulatory requirements and implement robust security measures to protect sensitive data.
The move away from paper-based payment methods has been an incredible plus for IT and information security leaders, keeping all transactional activity in one place, and fully transparent. No more paper checks!
Automated systems generate detailed reports on payment activities, providing insights into payment trends and performance. This data can be analyzed to optimize payment processes and help CFOs make better decisions.
Regular reviews and refinements of automation processes ensure ongoing optimization. By adapting to pioneering new procurement platforms like Zip, finance and procurement leaders can continuously improve their AP workflows.
When selecting a payment automation solution, companies should consider the following essential and advanced features:
To measure the ROI of payment automation, we suggest taking a look at these 10 steps.
Payment automation offers numerous benefits.
When implementing payment automation, companies should prioritize security to protect sensitive financial data and ensure compliance with regulatory requirements. Here’s what we recommend.
Zip offers a comprehensive AP automation solution as part of its pioneering Procurement Orchestration platform. Your team can take advantage of:
By adopting Zip's AP automation, finance teams can optimize their AP process, achieve significant cost savings, and enhance overall efficiency.
For more information or to see how Zip can transform your AP process, request a demo today.
Download this free intake and procurement orchestration RFI from Spend Matters.
Read more