Accounts Payable Workflow Automation (Brief Overview)

Most companies these days are looking for ways to do more with less. We want to speed up processes, make things more accurate, and give employees the tools they need to succeed.

While investigating tools for your accounting department, you might have come across the concept of accounts payable workflow automation. If you’re not sure what that is or how it could help, read on. We’re going to look at all the most important points.

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What Is Accounts Payable Workflow Automation?

If you’re interested in AP automation but not entirely sure what it is, think of it as simply automating some of the more tedious manual tasks that your accounts payable people have to do. This often starts with the procurement process. Buyers enter purchase orders into your account payable solution. When an invoice is received, and the PO is marked as delivered, it automatically moves onto the AP list.

Then, depending on that supplier’s payment terms, the information from the invoice might automatically be included in the next check run, and so on. This means there is less hands-on data entry for your team, fewer chances that something will be missed or entered incorrectly and helps to speed up the AP process.

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Why Does Automating Accounts Payable Workflow Make Sense? 

The most obvious reason why automating accounts payable workflow is that your AP team will have less tedious data entry to do, which means that they can focus on other tasks, or even that you might need fewer AP staff. That means there could be a cost saving for your company because you make the switch to automated accounts payable.

Less obvious is that you will have fewer bills and invoices falling through the cracks. That means you’ll never forget to pay suppliers on time, and your accounts will never be put on hold. It’s also much better for your credit! Staying on top of every payment just makes good business sense.

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Easier to Onboard New Employees 

If your company is growing, there’s a good chance you need to hire new people from time to time. Even if they have the right training and experience, it can be time-consuming to teach them your processes.

AP automation cuts down the amount of user interaction there is with your accounts payable workflow, so there’s less training to be done.

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How Can You Start Automating Accounts Payable?

Many of the more popular accounting packages, like QuickBooks, already have some accounts payable workflow automation built into the system. Different kinds of transactions automatically move through the system, from one step to the next, and there’s always a record of where each invoice is in the process.

However, while software like QuickBooks is a great tool to make your accounting and bookkeeping processes easier, it can’t do everything you might need to do to automate your AP process.

That’s why we built the LiveFlow platform. It creates a real-time data link with your QuickBooks account and allows you to select and link key data to Google Sheets and more. This means that you can create custom steps in your AP process, share data and more.

Accounting used to be a very hands-on, paper-heavy, often tedious process, but times have changed. If you embrace the right kind of technology to build custom accounts payable workflow automation, you can cut hands-on time down and increase productivity.

If you’d like to find out more about LiveFlow, and how it can help to modernize and automate not only your accounts payable but your entire accounting department, we’d love to show you. Contact our team to ask questions and book a demo.