Bridging the gap between ERPs and AP processes can be tedious and confusing. Cut out the confusion and streamline processes today.
Acumatica Commerce Edition and integrated third-party add-ons help companies overcome obstacles to receiving, processing, and fulfilling online orders for their multichannel sales and handling other back-office business workflows.
This article explains the obstacles that businesses with online retail commerce face, the features that Acumatica Commerce Edition ERP provides them, and how third-party Acumatica integrations with Ecommerce and retail solutions for finance and accounts payable automation provide digital transformation with cost savings from enhancing Acumatica functionality and efficiency.
AP Obstacles Undermining Retail Businesses
Retail or other types of businesses with online sales channels must overcome several accounts payable obstacles:
- Time-consuming and error-prone manual invoice processing: When using an ERP alone without add-on automation, manual data entry requires many steps and can be prone to human error. As volume increases, companies need to hire more staff. Digitizing invoice data using AI/ML with OCR is much more efficient and less costly, with automated invoice processing and document management.
- Delayed invoice approvals: Invoice approvals take more time without a digitized system. Matched paper document sets need to be manually routed, approvers must be in the office, and the documents may be lost. Instead, AP automation automates approval routing and uses digital invoice data matched with supporting documents for quick approvals.
- Paying for inventory and other items from global suppliers: Retailers face global complexity and must achieve global regulatory compliance, including FATCA rules and OFAC/SDN. They must make domestic and cross-border payments on time. Global payment complexity may require maintaining multiple banking and payment rails. Payers also face changes in currency exchange rates between the invoice date and the payment date. If invoice processing takes too long, your company may not be able to take lucrative early payment discounts.
- Reconciling accounts payable payments with the general ledger: Manual reconciliation of payments with the general ledger requires additional staff time and can delay the accounting close. Instead, real-time payment reconciliation with AP automation software significantly speeds up your financial close and lets accounting staff use that time in more strategic or analytic ways.
- Maintaining positive supplier relationships. To get merchandise on time to prevent out-of-stock situations, your business needs to establish excellent E-commerce supplier relationships, including maintaining good credit, making timely payments, and effectively communicating payment status.
- Invoice management and storage. Filing paper documents, including invoices matched with purchase orders and receiving documents, takes time and can result in misfiled documents. Archiving paper-based invoices offsite costs money.
Acumatica Commerce Edition Overview
Acumatica Cloud ERP, including its Commerce Edition (a retail ERP), can be deployed in a private or public cloud or in-house. It is accessible from any device, including computers and mobile devices, and provides an excellent customer experience.
Acumatica Commerce Edition is omnichannel and includes four Acumatica products (providing six core components) and some optional Acumatica integrations for retailers and other companies with online sales or Ecommerce operations. Acumatica Commerce Edition integrates with in-store point-of-sale (POS) systems and web stores.
The four Acumatica products included in the Acumatica Commerce Edition are:
- Acumatica Financials
- Acumatica Distribution
- eCommerce Connector
- Product Configurator
The Acumatica Distribution product includes functionality for sales orders, inventory, purchasing, and fulfillment.
Acumatica Commerce Edition core components covered by its four included products are:
- Advanced Inventory
- Advanced Fulfillment
- Order Management
- Advanced Financials
- eCommerce Connector
- Product Configurator
Optional Acumatica applications for companies with online retail operations include:
- Acumatica CRM
- Sales Tax Automation
- Marketplace Integration
- Acumatica Manufacturing
Acumatica Manufacturing integration is for manufacturers (using Acumatica Manufacturing Management) that also offer online sales via eCommerce.
Advanced Inventory
Acumatica inventory features are included in Acumatica Distribution, as part of its Commerce Edition ERP solution. These advanced inventory management features include real-time inventory tracking, managing inventory in multiple warehouses, and automatically providing lot and serial number tracking.
Acumatica Inventory Management can help your business optimize its inventory levels with automatic replenishment, prevent stockouts, and reduce backorders. With Acumatica, you can optionally integrate a warehouse management system (WMS). Barcode scanning is available.
Advanced Fulfillment
The Acumatica advanced fulfillment system is from Acumatica Distribution within Acumatica Commerce Edition. Advanced fulfillment lets your business efficiently pick, pack, and ship customer orders, automatically track packages, and provide customers with their shipment status.
Order Management
Acumatica order management includes sales order management and purchase order management as part of the Acumatica Distribution product included in Acumatica Commerce Edition. This product has order processing, inquiry, and tracking capabilities.
Sales Order Management
For Acumatica sales order management, your business uses a dashboard to:
- Enter quotes
- Check available inventory
- Track prices and apply discounts
- Fulfill sales orders
- Create shipments
Acumatica ERP will help your company streamline returns, including sales-order-related customer returns, by handling reverse logistics process workflows. The Acumatica Community describes a process for determining back order items by sales order line level, without Acumatica ERP providing a direct back order status by SO line item.
Purchase Order Management
For Acumatica purchase order management, your business:
- Associates sales orders with purchase orders, via a link
- Allocates items received to orders
- Creates manual links or automatically creates purchase orders
Advanced Financials
Acumatica Financials provides basic general ledger (GL), accounts receivable, accounts payable, cash, and tax functionality. Acumatica can handle consolidation and intercompany elimination for multi-entity companies. Acumatica ERP Commerce Edition also provides a real-time financial dashboard, analysis tools, and reporting.
Your business can add data visualization to Acumatica using OData and Microsoft Power BI. It can also integrate other third-party add-ons, including unified AP automation, mass payments, procurement, expense management, and advanced FX software, with Acumatica ERP.
Ecommerce Connector
Acumatica ECommerce Connector provides real-time native integration connectivity to eCommerce platforms through storefront connectors for Acumatica BigCommerce integration or Acumatica Shopify integration. Your Ecommerce web store is connected to Acumatica Commerce Edition ERP to unify inventory, operations, and reporting backend functions.
The Ecommerce Connector syncs data between systems upon receiving orders and updates financials. The Acumatica Ecommerce solution syncs online and offline orders, product information, promotions and discounts, and provides shipment and tracking information in the store.
Product Configurator
The Acumatica Product Configurator lets customers choose more product configurations, bundles, and groupings and provides them with downloadable and virtual products.
Ready to get more out of your Acumatica software?
Tipalti AP automation enhances Acumatica to save time and money and improve financial controls and compliance for making global payments. Earn early payment discounts and improve supplier relationships with on-time invoice payments.
Scale Your Commerce Business with Acumatica Add-Ons
Third-party add-ons can be seamlessly integrated with Acumatica Commerce Edition to provide more functionality and automation, often driven by artificial intelligence technology.
Tipalti Finance Automation Software With Acumatica Integration
Tipalti AP automation software, for accounts payable invoice processing with Acumatica ERP integration, reduces fraud risk and error rates and facilitates tax and global regulatory compliance for payments. Tipalti’s retail accounts payable automation software eliminates the need for manual data entry, handling paper documents, and entering data twice into separate, siloed systems.
Tipalti’s unified finance automation software platform, integrating with Acumatica ERP as multi-entity and multi-currency software, saves your business substantial time and money. As Tipalti finance automation software products, Tipalti offers, AP automation, mass payments, employee Expenses, advanced FX products called Multi-FX and FX Hedging (for payables), and Procurement. Tipalti provides outstanding customer support and has a 98% customer satisfaction rate.
Expense management automation for employee expense reimbursement works in combination with Tipalti’s AP automation software. Tipalti Expenses enables mobile device receipt capture and approvals for automated expense report submission and quick approvals of qualifying business expenses. By adding Tipalti’s expense management software, your company will gain company expense policy compliance with spend control.
Tipalti Card is a (cash-back) corporate spending card issued to your U.S.-based employees after submitting an application to Tipalti and getting account approval. Tipalti Card lets your business control its employees’ non-PO purchases without requiring expense report reimbursement.
Self-Service Supplier Onboarding
The Tipalti AP automation platform provides a multi-language, payer-branded Supplier Hub portal for guided self-service onboarding by your suppliers. Your suppliers enter their contact information, complete their W-9 or W-8 forms data, indicate their preferred payment method, and provide payment account information.
The Supplier portal will automatically show a history of received supplier invoices and invoices paid, with payment status for open invoices. Automatic payment status reduces the need for your accounts payable staff to answer payment inquiries. With suppliers entering their data during onboarding, accuracy should be higher than when your company uses traditional manual data entry.
Tax Compliance
After collecting W-9 or W-8 forms from suppliers, Tipalti AP automation tracks supplier payments and prepares tax preparation reports for the calendar year to use for completing 1099-MISC, 1099-NEC, and 1042-S forms through its Tax Compliance for AP feature.
To prevent fraud and 1099 penalties for inaccurate TINs, Tipalti validates the supplier’s tax identification number (TIN) provided on the W-9 or W-8 form, using its proprietary KPMG Approved Tax Engine.
Your business can optionally purchase a SaaS license and use Tipalti-partnered software Tax1099 from ZenWork (with native Tipalti integration) to transfer 12 months of calendar-year supplier payment data from Tipalti and automatically eFile 1099-MISC and 1099-NEC forms.
When VAT-assessing countries require VAT numbers, Tipalti collects and validates VAT IDs and matches invoice VAT numbers to the supplier-provided tax ID for the accuracy required to reclaim VAT.
Global Regulatory Compliance
The automated global regulatory compliance features in Tipalti AP automation software will check suppliers against sanctions lists, including OFAC/SDN to help prevent making illegal payments and lower AML (anti-money laundering) risks.
Intake and Purchase Order Management
Tipalti Procurement software is an intake to procure product that lets employees easily submit purchase requisitions (PRs) for approval through a centralized menu tab and automatically creates purchase orders (POs) from approved PRs.
Touchless Invoice Processing
Tipalti AP automation software enables paperless, AI-driven automated invoice processing, starting with smart OCR to capture invoice data by heading and line items, perform verification using over 26,000 payment rules to flag discrepancies, 3-way or 2-way matching, advanced guided approvals with the click of a button, large payment batch scheduling for global payments, and automatic real-time payment reconciliation (with syncing to your general ledger).
The real-time payables data reconciliation with your synched ERP may speed up your financial close by up to 25%. This functionality benefits financial management and may mean less routine work for the accounting staff work after regular business hours, increasing employee motivation.
Global Remittance and FX Solutions
With Tipalti, you can pay your global suppliers using their choice of preferred payment method. Tipalti pays to 196 countries in 120 currencies using several types of EFTs. Tipalti offers optional advanced foreign exchange (FX) software products that convert foreign currencies at cost-effective live rates and enable payables hedging. With Tipalti Multi-FX, you can centralize global payments without setting up a regional international bank branch network.
Tipalti provides cash requirements information that will help your company with its cash flow forecasting and cash management.
AI-driven AP Automation and Analytics
Tipalti AIâ„ within its AP automation software will capture invoice data through OCR, perform automatic GL coding, identify matching discrepancies, prevent paying duplicate invoices, predict approvers, and provide a chatbot/digital assistant (Ask Tipalti AIâ„ ). Businesses use Ask Tipalti AIâ„ to make business intelligence-type spend inquiries (with embedded Chat GPT-4 large language generative AI model technology and natural language prompts).
Why Tech Adoption is Important for the Retail Industry
Tech adoption is important for the retail industry because retailers are experiencing inflation, supply disruption costs, and fierce competition. They traditionally offer price discounts to attract customers. Therefore, retailers must be at the forefront of technology to personalize offers and pricing to meet customer needs and find ways to reduce their cost structure.
Technology streamlines retail customer-facing and back-office operations with ERP-integrated unified systems and workflow automation driven by artificial intelligence, prevents overpayments, and lowers costs to increase profitability. To adopt the latest unified finance automation software technology from Tipalti, request a demo.
