How A BPM Consultant Can Improve Your Accounts Payable Department
Business owners face a classic dilemma between maintaining a healthy cash flow and nurturing supplier relationships.
Ultimately, businesses that can manage to walk this tightrope are the ones who stay profitable and scale higher. But balancing and fulfilling both these organizational objectives is challenging. Unfortunately, this is true with most enterprises that rely on inefficient paper-based practices such as manual record-keeping, manual authorization of large numbers of checks or honoring a large number of non-PO invoices.
How AP woes increase as your business scales
As your business grows, the number of transactions you process increases and so does the workload that your Accounts Payable department handles. That's why growing companies need to focus on improving AP efficiencies and avoid falling into the trap of increasing AP overhead costs as they scale.
Research firm Aberdeen Group's survey highlights the need to better manage a growing volume of transactions. Their survey reports that up to 20% of invoices regularly contain incorrect or incomplete information. Manually correcting invoices and reconciliations create delays in processing payments—which can affect the company's credibility, invite late payment fines, and even hamper relationships with suppliers and vendors.
Efficient AP practices are critical for any organization within any sector to function smoothly and retain healthy working capital. Streamlining AP workflows ensures quick turnaround times in payment processing, reduces the risk of delayed payments, and increases compliance.
Optimizing AP with BPM consulting strategies
The AP function is complex—involving close coordination with many business lines and functions such as the purchasing department. Along with processing payments, AP teams also interact with vendors and partners. It is mission-critical to mitigate failure or delays in the process—the risks of inefficient AP processes can range from simply missing payment discounts to incorrect financial forecasting and damaging their reputation within the supplier ecosystem. That's why it's crucial to fix AP woes in time with the help of a strategic business process management or BPM consultant.
Understanding what a BPM consultant can deliver
BPM is an iterative process that starts with defining the business case for business process improvement, gathering requirements, and designing workflows based on business rules. Automation is applied wherever possible; a test environment is created to simulate the new processes, and tweaks are made for continual improvements to the process.
The success of a BPM implementation requires strong business knowledge, flexibility to change operational processes, and organizational maturity for change management. Lastly, it helps to work with a reliable and knowledgeable implementation partner.
Choose Revolution Data Systems as your partner for BPM and process automation. Our BPM consultants have extensive experience in streamlining and automating AP processes.
Key areas that BPM consultants look to improve in AP workflows
Small improvements can yield big results! Our BPM consultants have the experience to pinpoint areas in your AP department's operational processes that can benefit from AP automation and result in considerable savings in time and costs.
Invoice receipt: If a high volume of invoices are received in paper format and are processed manually, they may not be entered into the financial system in a timely fashion. Our BPM consultant may re-engineer your AP processes using scanning and OCR workflows to ensure all invoices are digitized and immediately available in the accounting system for faster processing.
Invoice matching and authorization: Sometimes, a high number of transaction documents like purchase orders and good receipts accumulate and are not authorized, or there are a large number of non-PO invoices. Automated two-way PO-invoice matching and digitized authorization processes ensure faster and more accurate invoice processing.
Query resolution: If your AP team follows manual query resolution processes, there may be a high volume of invoices in a query or on-hold status or invoices may be sent to the wrong people for resolution, leading to long wait times. Our BPM consultant may re-engineer the process to introduce automatic workflows for query resolution with email notification and reminders and enable audit trails for monitoring the status of invoices.
Payment: We monitor your process performance to reduce the number of delayed or rejected payments and optimize the use of early payment discounts. Our BPM consultant will tweak your AP processes to reduce check payments and increase the percentage of online payments, so your AP team spends less time and effort on payment processing. Our BPM consultant may also streamline your AP workflows to separate the payment approval process from payment execution to ensure faster payment cycles.
BPM consultants help you scale efficiently, optimize costs, & improve your business bottom line
At Revolution Data Systems, our consulting teams specialize in redesigning processes to achieve specific business benefits.
Our BPM consultant works with you to map out processes in your day-to-day physical operations, identify pain points or hurdles and then re-engineer or refine your operational workflows to build efficiency and improve productivity.
Shorten time-to-revenue with BPM technology solutions from RDS
We use advanced workflow management tools and leverage our in-depth knowledge of business process management to continuously improve operational efficiency, use fewer human resources, and improve the business bottom line.
With RDS as your partner, you can develop and implement an automation strategy across departments and technologies. Our process management experts bring an integrated perspective, capturing and ingesting documents with document capture software and streamlining the order-to-pay cycle with automation that converts paper-based approvals to digital workflows.
Contact RDS for expert BPM consultants to help you align your AP processes, optimize workflows and mitigate the risks of manual AP workflows.