Accounts Payable: Choose the Right Software to Manage Your Payables

Accounts payable are the bills and other debts that a business needs to pay. The only thing that a business pays that is not considered accounts payable is payroll. Everything else falls under the category, making it a critical aspect of your business.

The right Accounts Payable Software results in processing that’s faster than manual data entry and invoice processing. With accounts payable automation, tracking down lost invoices and entering data into multiple systems will be time-consuming headaches of the past.

Key Features of Accounts Payable Software

• AP record creation. Accounts payable software provides all the tools necessary to create records for payment obligations
• Check-writing. Creation and printing of individual checks or batch check runs for supplier/vendor payments
• Aging reports. Aging reports allow users to report on AP records by the number of days they are outstanding
• Lookup searches and filtering. The ease with which the AP database can be searched and filtered can affect the effectiveness of company cost control efforts
• Recurring payments. Provides pre-approval and execution for payment of repeating expenses
• Purchase order reconciliation. Coordinates workflows and provides functional support for matching Accounts Payable & Purchase Orders.
• Payment approval authorization management. Payment approvals require authorization based on user privilege levels in order to control final payment of accounts payable items

Benefits of Accounts Payable Software

• Eliminate Manual Data Entry & Lower Costs. Manually processing paper invoices can lead to lost data, entry errors, and invoice duplicates, creating a high costs. The goal of automating the Accounts Payable department is to streamline these processes which ultimately reduce costs.
• Efficiency. By automating your accounts payable process, you relieve workers from monotonous tasks and free them to use their skills in more productive ways. In most cases, invoice processing is primarily focused on reading and entering figures, then checking them for accuracy.
• Oversight. Even though it might seem that automating accounts payable could make you less aware of the day-to-day operations, the opposite is true. By pulling only relevant data and presenting it only to relevant parties, automated accounts payable gives you more oversight possibilities. By putting everything online in a transparent process, you can collate data into usable reports or drill down into specific clients and specific workers.
• Streamlined processes. Even the best manual approval process hit snags where some supplier invoices or payments may fall through the cracks. Accounts payable automation lets you automate the approval and entire workflow process, including checking to make sure that billed amounts are correct and that all relevant parties are notified and approve the expense at appropriate intervals. By automating this process, there is no need to chase down missing information. If everything's going well and you simply want to check on the status of an invoice, you can do so with a few clicks.
• Record keeping. By automating your accounts payable and using a transparent, digital process for this critical business function, you're also creating a digital trail that anyone can follow. If you have stacks of paper forms in a file cabinet somewhere, you know that sometimes paper gets lost, along with critical signatures. Moving your accounts payable to an automated platform gives you the ability to track every step of your operations and then hold those records in keeping with a standardized retention schedule.