While many companies who contact us about automating their AP process are primarily interested in digitizing processes to save time and money, often in the form of early pay discounts, other companies may not fall into this category. Still, the process of automating and digitizing your AP process can bring other, often overlooked benefits to your organization. For companies large and small, this blog delves into those often overlooked items that can drive business savings and growth.
Companies with Limited Cash Flow
The importance of strategically using your company’s resources to drive growth is especially pertinent in this economic climate, no matter the size of organization. Now more than ever, companies are looking for more ways than ever to cut costs yet drive growth.
- How can we optimize business activities?
- Is it worth it to automate business operations with limited cash flow?
For example, let’s assume that a company has limited cash flow due to investing heavily in an internal company project. The company knows that if they stretch out their payments on invoices, and instead invest that money into the project, the company will grow at a more rapid rate. In turn, they will earn them more money in the long run, rather than taking advantage of early pay discounts.
Automating your AP process with a solution like EZ Cloud heavily assists customers in both capitalizing on early pay discounts and ensures that your bills aren’t late. While companies may want to stagnate and stretch their payments out, being late on payments often affects vendor relationships, future negotiable vendor terms, and often causes additional late fees to accrue. Using a solution that optimizes time and efficiency, you’re able to complete projects with minimal heavy lifting and improve supplier relationships in the process. With over 90% metadata extraction, EZ Cloud assists customers in paying the bills that matter most.
Digitizing your AP Process
Optical Character Recognition (recognizing text on images), or OCR, is now over 100 years old. Even 100 years ago, companies were looking for ways to easily store and archive their files to meet compliance standards. Emanuel Goldberg invented OCR in 1914, which originally worked with film. Companies in the 1920s began heavily microfilming their documents, which allowed companies to store documents at 1:15 – 1:42 the original size.
Still today, many companies are required to store, retain, and back-up copies of their records, typically for around 7 years. EZ Cloud offers solutions to help customers still operating on paper to capture and store their invoices in the cloud. Our solution is also able to help customers migrate to an automated “digital,” labor-free invoice capturing process. Using OCR technology, advanced AI and machine learning technologies, and cloud storage capabilities. companies are able to digitize their processes without the hassle of a physical paper trail.
Meeting Compliance Standards
If you’ve worked in for accounting for long, you probably know that the words “Accounts Payable” and “simple” are not two synonymous words, nor have you probably heard them used in a sentence together. While companies may have a tried-and-proven record of paying their invoices on time and even getting discounts using their own manual process, we’ve seen many customers struggle from the compliance perspective.
EZ Cloud can assist customers in gaining insights into things from cash flow, fraudulent behavior, problematic suppliers, past due invoices, and much more. The added benefit of time savings allows your company to refocus its efforts on being “proactive” rather than “reactive.” Employees will now have more time to focus on ensuring that invoices aren’t slipping through the cracks, following proper company procedures, and allowing them to focus their efforts on job organization and preparation. For AP departments large and small, this reduces headaches and stress all around.
Creating a Better Work Culture and Improving Productivity
Most managers know that employees performing the same repeated menial tasks over and over leads to diminished employee performance over time. It’s no secret that data entry jobs have low retention and more senior employees often have lower performance than when they were new at the job. We’ve seen examples of companies breaking up menial tasks within their company by giving employees “in-between tasks.” However, employees like being recognized as participating in solving company challenges. Giving the employee additional responsibilities in order to break the constant repeated data entry grind.
Improving employee efficiency allows employees to refocus their efforts on other tasks naturally. In addition, the need for completing manual tasks, including hiring data entry temps, which your employees have to then train in an already time-constrained environment, is eliminated with the use of AP automation. For most people, having pride in the work they perform is the #1 item that correlates to job satisfaction. Employees want to be recognized as supporting company initiatives and solving challenges – why not put them in a position that improves productivity and supports overall better work culture.
Do any of these scenarios sound like issues you’re facing in your company? Are there ways to digitize your AP processes, maintain compliance standards, or even create a better work culture? If so, EZ Cloud would love to show you how we can help your organization with digital transformation. Contact EZ Cloud today to schedule a free consultation and demo.
