KnowledgeLake Blog

The Top 3 Benefits of Automating Your Accounts Payable Process

Written by Christy Gary | Oct 31, 2019 7:53:00 AM

Accounts payable automation is nothing new, but it’s quickly becoming a must-have for many organizations. According to Aberdeen Group, AP automation can save your organization as much as $16 per invoice or more. Not only that but AP automation pays for itself within 6 to 18 months on average. Those are no small numbers.

Maybe you know your organization’s accounts payable processes are inefficient but are hesitant to move away from your tried and true methods, and we understand. But the truth is that, if your AP department is still manually processing invoices and entering data, it’s not running as efficiently as it could be.

Here are the top three benefits of automating your accounts payable process:

1. Increased efficiency. Without automation, processing an invoice can take as long as two weeks. By automating the process of keying in data, your accounts payable employees can spend time working on more analytical tasks that create more value for your organization.

2. Increased accuracy and reduced errors. Manual data entry and invoice processing is a recipe for simple errors. Misfiling, losing documents, paying the wrong amount, and even a simple addition error can cost time and money to fix. Automating your accounts payable process eliminates the chance for costly errors, making it easier for your AP department to save both time and money.

3. Better compliance with regulations. Manually managing your accounts payable process introduces risk to your organization because there’s always a chance for details to slip through the cracks. Automating your accounts payable process ensures that invalid invoices are always noticed and reported, keeping your organization’s invoices secure and protected.  

KnowledgeLake specializes in leveraging Microsoft for accounts payable processing and archiving. We’ve been doing it for clients for 20 years and it’s the largest part of our business. Nearly half of our clients automate AP as part of their overall KnowledgeLake solution. When it comes to accounts payable, we’ve seen it all. Reach out to our AP automation experts to hear more about how we can help.