Top 5 Accounts Payable (AP) Pains

It's a known fact that the manual accounts payable (AP) process is plagued with problems. To help identify pain points related to your AP process, here’s a list of the top five most common pains that plague businesses:

1. Missing invoices. Was the invoice sent by mail, email, or fax? Was it addressed to the purchaser or the AP department? Did the finance team receive the invoice, or is it sitting on a desk? Manual AP processes often result in lots of finger pointing between the AP manager, purchaser, and vendor.

1. Extensive manual work. Between scanning paper invoices, manually keying in information, and printing and signing paper checks, the traditional AP process is labor and time intensive. As businesses grow, there’s less time to spend on tedious, error-prone processes.

1. Our business is growing, but we don’t have the resources to hire another employee. We hear this one a lot. Growth is a really good thing, but a common side effect for rapidly expanding companies can be a lack of resources to support their growth. Lots of AP professionals don’t have the bandwidth to spend time manually processing invoices and making payments.

1. Stacks of paper invoices scattered throughout departments. Businesses without electronic document storage rely on filing cabinets and banker boxes filled with paper invoices. It’s 2016; your finance departments shouldn’t be digging through paperwork to track down invoices.

1. Was this invoice processed already? A common question that AP managers hear far too often from vendors and purchasers. In a manual process, once an invoice is sent to the approver, AP managers have little visibility into the status and are unable to answer the question.

What pain points associated with AP are we missing? Join the conversation by tweeting at @MineralTree using the hashtag #AccountsPayablePains, and let us know the problems you have with your business’s AP process.

by Mineral Tree