What is Accounts Payable Automation?

Accounts payable automation enables companies to touchlessly process supplier invoices without human intervention by providing a digital workflow to manage steps previously handled by an AP staff member.

Holistic accounts payable automation enables automated start-to-finish business payment processing. This starts with software that captures invoice data in a digital format, usually through a form of scanning or capture method, such as optical character recognition (OCR). The AP system then classifies, matches, and validates data, and forwards to the accounting system or ERP to be processed.

Accounts payable automation can provide significant cost savings for a company beyond the expected savings from eliminating manual tasks. Companies can optimize their vendor portfolio, avoid duplicate or erroneous payments, reduce fraud risk, and take advantage of early payment discounts.

How Does Accounts Payable Automation Benefit Businesses?

• Provides improved visibility into spend
• Improves cash flow management
• Reduces risk of fraud
• Enhances control over how suppliers are paid
  
  

Want to find out how much your company could save with an AP Automation Solution? Try our Savings Calculator. Enter a few figures into our tool to see your potential savings. Compare your metrics against the average Medius customer to see how much you can save. Enter your data for immediate results, or download a custom report.

How Does Accounts Payable Automation Benefit AP Departments?

AP automation software helps make AP departments successful. It enables:

• Efficient, accurate, and timely invoice processing
• Improved time management, allowing AP Managers to spend less time on manual tasks and more time on work that adds strategic value to their business
• Enables full visibility of invoices, spend and cash flow management to ensure AP teams can close the books on time, every time.
  
  
  

How to select an accounts payable automation software?

Companies looking to add automation in accounts payable should research different AP automation solutions carefully to ensure the best fit for their organization. It is critical that the accounts payable automation software selected can support all invoice processing use cases required by the business to ensure end to end automation of AP processing and hard savings in time and cost.

In addition, it is important to understand how the AP automation software integrates with a company’s ERP to ensure synchronization of data and a streamlined processing. ERP integration makes it possible to transfer master data from the ERP to the AP solution. AP automation solutions generally offer a range of ERP integrations from pre-packaged to fully managed connectors. To learn more about ERP integrations, click here.

Looking for more AP Automation resources?

Here are some tools that might be useful as you explore if an AP Automation solution is right for your business:

• AP Automation Guide. The ultimate resource for AP Automation & best practices. Whether you're looking into more streamlined AP processes, fully automating your invoice processing and/or payments or just curious about accounts payable automation, this is the guide for you.
  
  
• AP Benchmarks report. This report includes everything you need to know about the accounts payable process, the efficiency KPIs to measure and the latest AP benchmarks. Head over to our Benchmark Portal to explore!
  
  
• Market Guide for AP Automation. If you’re in the market for an accounts payable invoice automation (APIA) tool, this Gartner® report, courtesy of Medius, can help you figure out your best options. Download the Gartner® report.