Hundreds of papers cross an accountant’s desk daily; accounting departments are one of the most document intensive areas of any organization. It is no wonder then that they are usually early adopters and primary drivers of a paperless office.
ECM and Workflow address the unique needs in AP and AR, allowing accountants to retain predictable processes, maintain organization and improve accuracy. Procedures can be standardized and preserved regardless of staff changes or fluctuations in work volume. Work and approvals can be automatically routed and escalated within the department or across departments. This ultimately allows accounting professionals to focus on their responsibilities by processing transactions quickly, accurately and compliantly.
Accounts Payable Processes
Invoice Processing
Accounting departments are consistently challenged when it comes to validating the accuracy of invoices, getting agreement and sign off for expenses and taking measures to eliminate double payment occurrences.
Essentials:
- A dynamic search and retrieval functionality within a centralized environment that is accessible to all departments, managers and executives
- Capture and store all bills, invoices and related content required to effectively manage the department
- Integrate with your SAP, Lawson, PeopleSoft, all of your existing financial applications to correlate and extract data from any source
- A powerful workflow with alert and notification capabilities customized to the specific needs of each user
- Match and bind related data and documents together
Rewards:
- Dramatically improve three way matching to streamline the invoice verification process
- Receive early payment discounts through quicker invoice processing
- Eliminate payment of duplicate invoices
- Extract and correlate data across applications to remove manual data entry
- Quickly reverse entries and correct inaccuracies across applications from a single interface
- Gain visibility into all content and processes for increased clarity, quick verification and approval
- Be notified of due dates to eliminate the chance for a missed payment and resulting late fees or service cancellations
Expense Reporting
Coordinating paperwork required to properly control expenditures and simplifying the process for receipt, review and validation of all expenses in a challenge in any cost conscious A/P department.
Essentials:
- Incorporate all content, from scanned receipt images to itemized expense report data
- Link together and bind related documents and data in the centralized repository
- Enhanced control of expense processing through a centralized repository accessible to all responsible parties
- Manage the approval workflow to connect departments and streamline the process
- Gain a complete and transparent audit trail of all information in the system to better track and manage expenses
Rewards:
- Quickly access vital information for verification purposes
- Remove bottlenecks and inefficiencies in approval process
- Gain a complete audit trail to eliminate lost items and duplicate information
- Satisfy auditors and meet compliance requirements quickly and effectively
- Improve collaboration when negotiating contracts with travel vendors
Budget Planning
It is vital that accountants be able to accurately forecast pro forma revenues and expenses.
Essentials:
- A central hub stores a history of all data and content required for quick access and review
- Connect business leaders across departmental silo’s with workflow automation
- Easily input requirements, needs and expenses into the electronic environment
Rewards:
- Collaborate seamlessly with all departments, managers and executives for improved decision making
- Access information from the centralized repository for enhanced planning
- Department managers can easily input projected expenses based on sales revenue
- Dramatically decrease time required to submit, review, approve and manage business expenses
Accounts Receivable Processes
Payment Processing
The greatest challenges in receiving payments include the complex process of matching payments to invoices and ensuring the receipt of all outstanding payments.
Essentials:
- Track outstanding receivable and invoices
- Integration ensures that any data input in the ECM system automatically updates all information across systems and programs
- Match and bind together related payments and invoices
Rewards:
- Verification and issue resolving are quick and painless
- Remove manual tasks such as data entry and document filing so workers can focus on value added activities
- Decrease days outstanding
- Simplify procedures to readily identify delinquent payments
Cash Flow Management
Effectively managing the in flow of cash and disbursement is vital in cash flow management.
Essentials:
- Workflow automation provides visibility into the processes driving the business
- Match and bind related data and documents together
Rewards:
- Greater transparency of cash flow procedure to perfect process management and discover areas for improvement
- Gain greater control over delinquent accounts
- Establish transparency of all accounts that are handled
Non-PO Invoices: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly
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