The future of finance is smart cost management.
Modern CFOs and financial leaders are powering through critical moments of disruption to strategically enable their high-performing companies for success.
Now, they’re evaluating their contingency plans and adjusting them for the potential impact of uncertainty—allocating the right resources to the right places without stifling opportunity.
These future-focused strategists are building their operations in pursuit of value-based optimization. They’re finding cost and growth opportunities by:
- Re-focusing available and unallocated capital
- Evaluating operations at scale while minimizing the hidden costs of manual processes
- Building and testing strategies that drive the business forward
- Managing risk and re-directing resources
- Finding costs savings while delivering the most competitive advantage
- Partnering with the right solutions in the pursuit of efficiency
- Utilizing budgeting models to identify what truly supports the business
Today’s financial leaders are expected to go beyond traditional accounting responsibilities to help drive the company’s direction while balancing short and long term needs. According to IOFM, accounts payable is considered the number one most time-consuming function in finance. To navigate AP, finance leaders must focus on guiding their companies to sustainable success.
5 Guiding Principles of Navigating Accounts Payable
1. Accelerate Supplier Management
Faster supplier onboarding results in significant time savings and reduces the number of errors associated with invoice processing and payment remittance. An intelligent, dynamic self-service supplier portal will effortlessly onboard vendors while improving supplier relationships.
- Onboard suppliers with a brandable portal
- Collect contact details
- Verify bank account information
- Collect and validate IRS and VAT tax IDs
- Promote supplier self-service
2. Implement Increased Financial Controls
Safeguard against fraud loss and strengthen internal processes with enterprise-grade financial controls. Automation provides granular controls that increase the security of sensitive financial data, ensure ongoing OFAC compliance, and improve management oversight of key AP processes.
- Configure data access controls & establish signatory rights
- Validate suppliers before approval
- Protect against loss with ongoing screening
- Prevent fraud with electronic payments
- Double down on risk management
3. Improve Global Cross Border Payments
Securely send thousands of payments at scale and proactively eliminate payment errors before they happen. Ensure fast, accurate mass payments to suppliers around the world—all with minimal accounts payable effort.
- Execute payments to multiple countries in multiple local currencies
- Offer multiple payment methods, including US ACH, global ACH (eCheck), wire transfer, PayPal, paper check, prepaid debit card
- Automatically validate supplier data in real-time
- Eliminate payment errors
- Implement secure mass payments backed by money transmitter licenses
4. Manage Multi Subsidiaries & Business Units
Navigate growth, scale compliantly, and future-proof financial operations by providing end-to-end AP capabilities for multi-entity companies in a single platform.
- Manage different AP workflows
- Scale with advanced multi-entity features
- Expand AP capabilities without adding more AP resources
- Report back to ERPs with multi-entity support
5. Streamline the Entire Accounts Payable Process
Free your finance team to do more with less by eliminating 80% of the accounts payable workload and automating the entire invoice-to-pay-to-reconciliation process.
- Scale rapidly without adding staff
- Automatically process invoices
- Accelerate financial close
- Eliminate financial & compliance risk
- Personalize 2-Way & 3-Way PO matching
To effectively modernize accounts payable, financial leaders need to maximize efficiency, accelerate visibility, rapidly adapt to changing business needs, and institute smart financial and cost controls. Finance teams at modern, high-performing companies have a critical role in navigating their organizations to long-term success.
