Barbara Cook

The full accounting cycle is a step process for recording transactions, preparing financial statements, and making closing entries for the monthly or annual accounting period. At year-end, closing entries include transferring net income or loss to the retained earnings account and resetting income and expense accounts to zero for the next accounting period.

Payment reconciliation may be a time-consuming process for accounting teams that slows down the monthly financial close. As businesses grow, the time required to reconcile payments and perform bookkeeping expands unless your business automates the payment reconciliation process with a real-time software solution.  

EDMS (electronic document management system) is a software platform for centralized records management, electronic document sending, storage, versioning, and retrieval for businesses and organizations. EDMS is used internally as an electronic document repository. Finance uses EDMS for electronic document exchange between the company and its vendors and document storage.

Invoice data can be complex and expansive. Every step—from supplier data to invoice management and payment reconciliation—are synchronized with the ERP system. The sync facilitates timely and accurate decisions. The sync enables visibility in every step of the payables transaction cycle.

Invoice matching compares supplier invoices with purchase orders for 2-way matching or purchase orders and receiving reports for 3-way matching.

Driving accounts payable change within a business is challenging—especially when AP is overwhelmed with everyday tasks. A major hurdle is making the business case for AP automation to C-suite executives. Particularly a CEO, CFO, and Controller.

For accounts payable and accounts receivable, invoice settlement means that an invoice balance was possibly partially paid, and the balance due was adjusted to zero. The adjustment may be a credit memo or debit memo. Invoice adjustments are from crediting returned goods, correcting invoicing or overpayment errors, resolving a dispute between the business customer and vendor, and write-offs.

Strongly consider updating your manufacturing ERP system with new technology to handle manufacturing operations and business processes. Select a software solution that matches your manufacturing business size, offers scalability for growth, provides features to improve decision-making and profitability, and fits your budget.

EDI (electronic data interchange) is cost-saving business process automation used by trading partners to send and receive validated electronic documents data exchange from computer system to computer system in standard formats without human intervention. EDI documents include purchase orders, invoices, payment documents, bills of lading, inventory documents, customs documents, and ship notices.

Odoo ERP is a popular platform and there are many Odoo alternatives that are just as good. The open-source ERP model of Odoo allows a business to leverage thousands of developers and works best for small to mid-sized companies. Larger enterprises and startups may want to consider some of the following alternatives:

Choosing the best Microsoft ERP solution depends on your budget, company size, industry, business application or module selection, and other business needs. New users will find a modern cloud-based solution with either Microsoft Dynamics 365 or Microsoft Dynamics Business Central. Microsoft Dynamics GP and Dynamics SL are still sold as standalone products which are on-premises with hosting options.

You want to integrate as seamlessly as possible with existing accounting and ERP systems. However there are many key steps along the supplier payment process that still require significant manual effort beyond sending out payment instructions to the transfer API for bank, ACH, and wire services.