Your Complete Guide to Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable and Expense Report Automation

The future of business is automation, and that includes the day-to-day processes that streamline operations and achieve financial health. In-house accountants and external audit firms know all about the struggle to balance the books and report a healthy financial statement. But in a high-volume business environment with fast cash inflow and outflow, you’ll need an automated system that manages accounts payable, accounts receivable, and expense reports, so you can focus on generating revenue for growing your enterprise.

Thinking of making the switch to automated financial management systems? Learn about the benefits that AP, AR, and Expense Report (XR) automation contribute to streamlining financial controls in business:

AP Automation: On-time Payments and Efficient Invoicing

Business accountants know all about the work and attention to detail that goes into the manual handling of accounts payable processes. Manual, paper-based systems have been the standard practice for many businesses, but the perks of automation are quickly changing that.

With specialized software like AP Assistant, you can now streamline your accounts payable processes, improve internal controls, and increase invoice compliance, while also reducing paper handling and mitigating the human error factor in the process. A robust, end-to-end invoice processing system will incorporate the industry best practices and allow your entire accounts payable department to stay up-to-date with pending payments, realize cost savings from efficient workflows, and increase overall productivity.

See what an Accounts Payable automation solution can do for your business:

• Process recurring invoices and PO’s quickly and accurately without the need for human intervention
• Access financial information securely
• Process and archive digital and hard copy invoices
• Expedite invoice approvals through a pre-programmed decision-making process
• Earn savings by identifying early-payment discounts and processing payments, and in the process, avoid penalties due to late payment
• Prevent data entry errors as a result of manual human intervention and eliminate double payments
• Improve audit and compliance practices using automated control features.

With these automated features, an automated Accounts Payable solution eliminates the need for manual tasks such as invoice data entry, invoice matching, G/L invoice coding, and the storage of paper invoices. The result is overall efficiency that helps your business earn savings and operate more smoothly.

AR Automation: Efficient Collections and Increased Cash Flow

On the other side of accounts payables are accounts receivables, and like the payments that go towards satisfying the former, your business needs an automated system to handle collections and increase cash inflow. So forget tracking all your collectibles one-by-one; with an automated accounts receivable tool, you can quickly recoup business expenses by ensuring that income is processed quickly and collected for various capital and operating expenditures.

If there’s one department in any business that knows about the struggle of maintaining a healthy accounts receivable portfolio, it’s the collections team. Tasked with collecting late or lost payments, managing payment disputes, reconciling and receiving cash, and keeping track of day’s sales outstanding, your collections department needs the support of an automated system like AR Assistant to minimize losses and increase productivity. But did you know that many billion-dollar businesses still manage accounts manually? Set your business apart from the rest of the market, and reap the benefits of efficiently managed finances.

Here’s what an automated Accounts Receivable solution can do for your business:

• Reduce day’s sales outstanding (DSO) by automating the allocation and reconciliation of cash to the accounting platform
• Reduce open and unallocated items
• Automate data capture, cash application, and exception handling to eliminate errors caused by manual systems
• Streamline invoice dispute management and resolve issues faster for customer satisfaction
• Eliminate storage and handling of hard copy documents
• Accelerate cash flow
• Learn and emulate the payment structure of your business

Compatible Systems

Both Ash Conversions’ AP Assistant and AR Assistant have worked with and are greatly compatible with various enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. So, whether the accounts department of your business is built on SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Lawson, Baan, Sage 300, 4th Shift, Capp Auto, or Yardi, you can count on these automated assistants to fully integrate into your preferred accounting system and generate cost savings through streamlined payables and receivables processes.

Expense Report Automation: Managed Spending and Improved Employee Productivity

All cash flows require proper documentation and management. Expense reports allow you to keep track of where revenue goes and what it pays for, so you can determine the cost efficiency of various operations and mitigate losses.

The next generation of expense reports are becoming increasingly automated. Moving away from paper handling and all too common data entry errors, an automated Expense Reporting solution such as XR Assistant allows employees to submit expenses digitally; on your end, this means eliminating cumbersome hard copy filing, delays caused by manual reporting, and errors with policy compliance. Overall, automated expense reports make it easy to monitor employee productivity and offer support for improving workflow efficiency.

Here’s what XR Assistant can do to streamline expense reports and promote overall efficiency:

• Reduced processing time with personalized and automated workflows for expense processing
• Reduce and prevent non-compliant submissions and enforce compliance with your company’s expense policy
• Automatically notify managers when new expense reports are submitted and bring to their attention issues and concerns that need to be addressed
• Provide automated, real-time validation of all expense reports according to compliance policies to control spending
• Reduce turnaround time through improved accessibility of submissions, approval, and reimbursements
• Allow employees to initiate the reporting process by submitting expenses
• Managers can immediately review and authorize payments
• Determine spending trends to negotiate discounts and implement better financial controls against set budgets.

Why You Need Automated Financial Systems

Automating your financial processes for managing accounts payables, accounts receivables, and expense reports is meant to streamline the accounting processes in your company. Efficient handling of finances and improved controls lead to better compliance, more detailed monitoring of cash flows, and increased productivity across the board.

With a clear picture of your company’s financial health, you can quickly identify constraints and mitigate losses, and promote overall growth through maximizing capital and profit. You can do all these and more knowing that each business decision is based on accurate financial information that’s free of human error.

Over time, you can count on your AP Assistant, AR Assistant and XR Assistant solutions to learn the financial processes and movements in your accounting system, so they can help you make smarter decisions which allow your business to keep up with a quickly evolving market.

To learn more about automating financial processes and controls, call Ash Conversions at (866) 433-4549 or contact us here.