Top five benefits of AP automation

What is AP automation and how can it benefit your organization?

Accounts Payable automation (AP automation) technology aims to provide a more efficient, faster and more accurate way to handle this back-end financial process. By eliminating manual processes and piles of paper, AP automation improves supplier and partner relationships while saving time and money for finance teams. 

In this blog post, we will be discussing the top five benefits of AP automation and how you can take advantage of these in your organization. 

Increased employee satisfaction

A significant benefit of AP automation is that it can free up the finance team's time to focus on the innovative, value-added work that can only be performed by a human. This leads to higher job satisfaction. Automating the accounts payable process means that employees do not have to work on manual, repetitive tasks such as data entry, which can then boost their productivity and lead to happier staff.

Reduced human error

Human error is the most common reason for a company's damaged brand reputation for being unreliable.

When a task has a tight deadline or there are stressful conditions in the workplace, employees are even more prone to error. 

Human error in AP can occur when manually inputting data from an invoice into your company's finance/ERP system (such as Microsoft Dynamcs 365 Business Central). This can lead to detrimental accounting mistakes. 

AP automation solutions such as Zetadocs ensures efficiency in the workplace by intelligently capturing invoice information. 

Increased reliability

If a company's finances aren't organized properly, many setbacks can occur. A company's accounting processes must be reliable to ensure consistent cash flow.

Relying on employees to never make mistakes when it comes to AP is far too risky in this crucial task. AP automation ensures a high level of visibility and control when it comes to policies, procedures and regulations. When automated, the finance team have constant access to payment and vendor information. Workflow automation can also empower employees as now employees are able to manage their own work more efficiently, meaning managers do not need to oversee every step of the process.

Zetadocs' AP automation solution requires no rules or templates to be set up and standardizes invoice data, making for reliable consistency in AP processes and streamlined payments. 

Time savings

Automating your manual processes significantly saves time by eliminating the need to correct errors and streamlining processes to help employees complete them more efficiently.

Repetitive and time-consuming tasks such as ensuring that invoices are correctly matched to orders and validating and approving invoices, can be automated. This frees up employees to focus on higher-level, intellectually stimulating tasks. 

Furthermore, manual tasks such as document printing and mailing use up valuable time and resources, which can be streamlined and completed more efficiently with automation. Invoices are routed directly to you ERP system, giving your finance team the opportunity to work on more important things. 

Cost savings

Research suggests it costs around £8 to process a supplier invoice manually. Automating this will dramatically reduce the cost.

AP Automation can eliminate paper invoices and documents, reducing costs and increasing your commitment to environmental sustainability. It can also significantly reduce paper consumption and storage needs, which is a further saving while also eliminating the risk of lost or misplaced records. 

Going paperless therefore reduces the cost per unit of processing.

How Zetadocs helps you

Although automation is an investment, looking at the long-term gains, it is a no-brainer. Zetadocs streamlines AP processes with intelligent OCR, automated data entry and order matching so you can focus on what matters most.​ 

 Key benefits include:  

• It is ready to go for Business Central. Finance teams can immediately benefit from the time savings Zetadocs brings, as there is no need to set up templates or rules or "train the system". 
• Faster than typing since Zetadocs creates purchase documents in Business Central with the header and line information populated automatically. It is quick and easy to make any changes needed on the Zetadocs preview screen.
• Fewer approvals are needed, enabling finance teams to pay invoices more quickly. Zetadocs matches purchase invoice lines to the related purchase order lines and given that the purchase order will typically have been approved already, there is no need for a second approval round on the purchase invoice.
• Full document visibility with original vendor documents always stored centrally and securely for easy on-screen retrieval via Business Central or Microsoft 365.

Want to find out more?

If you would like to know more about Zetadocs AP automation, watch this demonstration for more information or book a free demo.