You may delay, but time will not.”― Benjamin Franklin
Time is the business world’s second currency. As an AP professional, you’re always working against the clock. Most companies find ways to cut costs and drive profits, but how many of them are able to create new time?
According to a recent CFO article, APQC (American Productivity and Quality Center) surveyed finance leaders about how much time their organizations spend on transaction processing, control, decision support, and management activities. The results? In an average work week, finance staffs are spending the equivalent of Monday morning through lunchtime on Wednesday making sure that bills get paid, customers receive accurate invoices, general accounting work gets done, and fixed assets are accounted for, among many other tasks that keep money moving through an organization.
AP automation reduces invoice approval time from an average of 28 days to 2.7 days. By moving away from a paper-based system, you can streamline the accounts payable process and eliminate repetitive and time-consuming tasks. No more opening and sorting invoices, manual data entry, or waiting for interoffice mail or overnight courier for approvals. With automation, you can focus on vendor discounts and rebate procurement instead of copying and scanning files or searching for misplaced invoices.
Time = Money
The time savings achieved from AP automation allows for more visibility into the cash flow of your company as well. The CFO or controller can assist the CEO in high-level decision-making in ways that help the organization grow and become more profitable while the AP department becomes an efficient profit center.
The difference between AvidXchange and other automation providers is that they’re strictly software companies. That means that there’s still a considerable amount of time and effort required by you to enter invoices into your accounting system. For example, consider email invoices.
With AvidXchange, we receive the invoice, capture all the essential information, and process it into your approval process without anyone on your side touching it.
Our software-only competitors? An email invoice is sent to an AP manager who has to print it out and scan the email into the automation software. In addition to these time-consuming tasks, there’s also some data entry and OCR (optical character recognition) involved as well. Software without service could end up costing you time and money ¬instead of streamlining your process.
With AvidXchange, we create an average of 5000 hours of “new time” annually. That’s time that’s given back to your company. If you look at our competitors, their time savings might be around 1800 hours, while others might add 1000 hours.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have more time in your day?