Create an Invoice Payment Process That Works for Your Team

When it comes to the financial health and wellbeing of your business, your accounts payable team is at the forefront. Not only are they the ones responsible for tracking and confirming all invoices and bills, but they also need to ensure that all payments are timely. 

When your accounts payable process is inefficient, your business is susceptible to fraudulent payments, bills going unpaid, or worse, paying them twice. All of these things can frustrate the vendors you work with and hurt your company’s credit score. 

So, what are some simple ways you can streamline the invoice payment process for your accounts payable team? Let’s find out. 

How to Streamline Your Invoice Payment Process

  1. Create a centralized email address to filter all invoice and bill-related emails if you haven’t already. You want to be able to have everything filtered to a central location. Choose something easy that everyone on your team will remember and, more importantly, use. A prime example would be accountspayable@yourcompany.com. 
  2. Hire or assign an email “triage” person or team to handle monitoring the email address and delegating out all subsequent steps for invoices. This team will be the gatekeeper and ensure the process runs smoothly for the rest of the company. This team ensures the validity of the information on the bill and can handle coding the bills against their chart of accounts.
  3. Set up approval systems based on departments and locations within your company. Since approvals will typically include several levels of approvals in a mid-sized company, it’s important to have the accounts payable team ensure all information is accurate and correct. Having multiple team members and levels of approvals involved helps your company avoid costly errors and potential fraud.
  4. Create and enforce company policies around paying invoices. It’s not only important to set expectations but to also follow through. The only way to improve efficiency is by getting everyone on board and adopting the invoice payment process. Utilizing AP automation technology, like PaperTrl, can help to streamline this process and speed up the adoption process.
  5. Centralize invoice processing in a single system throughout your entire company with PaperTrl. Not only will this create efficiencies for your accounts payable team, but it will also provide you with the peace of mind that everything is appropriately cataloged and easily accessible. Having all invoices follow the same path makes it easier to train employees and maintain control over the payment process. This valuable technology can also store all invoices along with an audit trail of coding and approvals for future reference.

Your accounts payable team can only do so much, and it takes buy-in from your entire company to help streamline the invoice payment process and reduce costly errors. 

By implementing best practices around invoice payments, you can automate the workflow and minimize stress on your employees. Accounts payable automation software can also future-proof your business and AP processes by limiting manual data entry and helping to build efficiencies in the areas of your business that matter the most.  

Let PaperTrl Automate Your AP Process

From procure to pay, PaperTrl automates the AP process, helping businesses of all sizes simplify and streamline review and approvals, reduce processing time and associated costs, and minimize the potential for human error. 

PaperTrl is a fully integrated, cloud-based AP automation software solution that helps organizations simplify and streamline the AP process from purchasing to payments. Learn more about PaperTrl and contact us for a free demo.