Which is fine.

But, there are still ways to reap the benefits of an improved accounts payable workflow without going all in with automation. On a hamburger budget, you can enjoy the steak dinner of automation—even if it’s à la carte.

These are some of the accounting tools that’ll get you to a better way of doing things—a better payment workflow in AP.

Supplier portals

Many organizations like HP, IBM, and Google—any Fortune 500 organization, really—use vendor portals for both invoice submission and payment status inquiry.

Thanks to the downstream nature of technology, what was once the domain for large organizations, is now accessible to organizations of all sizes.

Supplier portals free accounts payable clerks from performing the more distracting tasks such as answering payment inquiry calls by allowing them to focus on their primary duty—paying suppliers on time.

Best of all, supplier portals are the gateway to document management, which is the first step to going paperless.

External check printing

Try as you might, you can never escape the paper check—as is the case when issuing one-offs or paying smaller suppliers’ invoices.

External check printing and mailing services have emerged as an electronic-friendly alternative to conventional paper checks. This tool is helpful for organizations that want to automate part of their payments process while still providing the touch of paper checks.

And when paired with APIs (as many of the higher-end external printing/mailing services offer) accountants need not leave their accounting platform—ever. Issuing and sending payment from a checking account is as simple as clicking a button.

T&E services

Payables performs a delicate balancing act when processing employee’s T&Es. Accountants, here, must keep an ever-watchful eye for fraud and malintent, all the while processing reimbursements for their peers’ business expenses. These competing priorities can prove a challenge even for the most experienced professional accountant.

Unsurprising, then, third-party T&E services have emerged within the past few years to address this pain—Expensify and Concur come to mind.

Organizations outsource the specifics of T&E, allowing payables to focus less on the “internal customer” and more on the “external” one; certainly making for a more palatable watercooler conversation.

Sharing data

Although not necessarily “just one tool,” the sharing of data across departments provides a whole toolbox of resources for accountants throughout an organization.

When non-siloed data (siloing is the term used to describe data that’s stuck in one application or organizational department) is shared, analytics and intelligence are used to make better decisions about business finances. For example, purchasing and procurement can use unobstructed data from payables to better negotiate rates from future suppliers. How? With the intelligence gleaned from knowing which suppliers already accept lowered invoice rates in exchange for faster payment. Purchasing and procurement can then work deals with this past payment behavior.

The only limitation in sharing data is a business analyst’s imagination.

Paperless

But the very best tool to improving any workflow in AP may very well be no tool at all.

By ditching paper—going paperless—AP gains time, a more secure process, and best of all, rebates.

Eliminating the need to transpose paper invoices into an accounting system saves countless hours and removes the risk of error in the transcription process. And since there’s no need for accountants to walk around the office, securing payment authorization is an almost immediate process.

What’s more, this efficient paperless workflow gives organizations the leverage needed to request invoice discounts in exchange for faster online payment. That’s why going paperless is the domain for rebates.

So how much will you have off the automation menu? An appetizer or the four-course meal of automation? Whatever you order, it’ll taste great!

The post The 5 Best Accounting Tools for Improving Your Payment Workflow appeared first on SiteProNews.

For a company of any size to reach a level of continued success, its individual departments need to have the tools for scalability. Departments, such as HR, accounts payable, and sales need to be in the cloud.

Salesforce’s report, “Benchmarks” covers six benchmarks, but for our purposes, let’s see how four of those directly relate to cloud computing:

1. Going mobile: Redefining the workplace

Being able to work anywhere is great for productivity and employee morale. It’s also a boon for employers as they can hire the best candidates anywhere in the world.

To take advantage of a mobile and remote workforce however, a company’s infrastructure should be up to that task.

Cloud-based services, or SaaS (software as a service), allows any person with an internet connection to contribute and collaborate to get work done. This is similar to a thin or headless client; software runs on an external computer and users connect to it.

Fundamentally, the cloud is about abstracting and externalizing the tools employees need. It also helps strengthen security and makes complying to industry standards easier.

2. Analytics and action: Working with the data

Insights are gleaned by pooling data. Even when data is contained in disparate spreadsheets and databases, it can still be analyzed. A cloud-based infrastructure lays the foundation for this type of analytics by centrally storing the data.

It’s the interconnected nature of the cloud that allows smart decisions to be made from the data available. What’s more, third parties are now creating bridges that connect multiple cloud instances together. This allows decision makers to extract even more intelligence from the data that’s available.

3. Automation: Making data work for you

Companies have lined up the one-two punch with mobile computing and data insights. Now they can go for the knock-out by following best practices with automation.

Automation empowers companies to do more with less resources. Accounts payable, sales, and HR can share data and complete tasks faster. For example, sales’ commissions can be paid faster and with less hassle when performance numbers and payroll’s software communicate with each other. These tasks, which usually require several hours and much oversight, can now be done in a few moments with a single click.

And that’s just one example of automation.

Marketing departments have been privy to this type of automation for several years. Marketers have been able to execute email campaigns on one platform that target contacts on a separate CRM platform.

The power is really in discovering ways to connect the different pieces.

4. Dynamic: Stacking it up or stacking it down

By combining the benefits of cloud-based services—mobility, analytics, and automation—companies gain a competitive advantage. The ability to scale on the fly is what sets a cloud-based company apart from companies that rely on legacy technology.

It makes investment in capital easier. Instead of basing infrastructure purchases on projections, cloud-based infrastructure allows companies to turn up the dial when more speed, more storage, or even more resources are needed.

Conversely, the dial can also be turned down when resources need to be scaled back. Cloud infrastructure protects a company from market uncertainties and can strengthen its bottom line. Scalability is, after all, a contraction for “ability to scale.”

The takeaway

While Salesforce reports the practices of successful businesses, they stopped short on stating the common denominator to these successes: cloud-based services. Successful companies, regardless of size, understand the importance of the cloud.

Does yours?

The post Can a Business Scale Without These 4 Tools? appeared first on SiteProNews.

Software is eating the world.

It may have been only slightly prescient then, but today, Andreessen’s words have become gospel for the tech community as a whole.

Unfortunately, the word according to Anderssen hasn’t traveled very far outside the tech industry. What’s more, his foretelling can be seen as a tale of things to come if industries don’t get in the game:

“More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services—from movies to agriculture to national defense. […] Over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted by software, with new world-beating Silicon Valley companies doing the disruption in more cases than not.” [emphasis ours]

If industries and organizations alike don’t heed this warning, they’ll quickly find themselves disrupted and displaced by a tech company. After all, it happened to hotels with Airbnb. It happened to taxis with Uber and Lyft. And it will most certainly happen to your organization.

Adapting to this threat, however, doesn’t require a whole rewrite of your business model. Rather, it can be as simple as adding a prophet of Andressen to your payroll—a developer.

Modern-day machinists

Let’s define what a developer is—or rather—what a developer can be for your organization: a modern-day machinist. The similarities are, after all, uncanny.

Consider when factory machinery breaks; it’s the machinist left to investigate and solve the problem. Whether it’s a matter of replacing the defective part with some off-the-shelf components, or milling a new cog out of a slab of aluminum, the machinist is ultimately responsible for fixing the system.

In the case of a developer, the problems they solve typically involve connecting pre-existing pieces of code—the machinist’s equivalent to ordering an off-the-shelf component—or coding a unique function entirely—the equivalent to milling a new part.

Both developer and machinist are ultimately responsible for “hacking” a solution into place.

The lazy man works once

It’s not just the hard skills a developer possesses that makes him or her a great hire (read, the actual ability to code). Rather, it’s the soft skills he or she brings to the table. More specifically, however, it’s their laziness.

In fact, Larry Wall, creator of the Perl scripting language, defined a developer’s unique type of laziness as a virtue:

“The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful, and document what you wrote so you don’t have to answer so many questions about it. Hence, the first great virtue of a programmer.”

Yes, developers have the intrinsic skills of programming, but they also know the subtler skill of finding system efficiencies—a trait that’s become increasingly important in these highly-competitive times.

A lazy developer, then, will only work once—just enough time it would take to automate their workflow.

Learned from the best

Universities not only teach this laziness to developers, they pride themselves in doing so. It’s a core part of the computer science curriculum, after all. It goes by a different name there: abstraction. Here’s how Harvard defines it:

“Complex details that may not be of interest are abstracted away so that the programmer works with only what is necessary to him. Abstraction is a key part of computer science, and more life in general.”

Abstraction is how developers can build upon the work of those who came before them. There’s no need to re-invent the wheel when a developer sits in front of a computer to code. The hard work’s been done by someone else. The industrious developer merely needs to find the right resource to get the job done.

And those resources are aplenty for the developer.

Resources such as GitHub, the largest development environment that also boasts a large repository of shareable and editable code, to API libraries that allow developers to extend the functionality of a program by “calling into” another program. The developer has these, and many other tools, readily available in their tool box.

In reality, then, hiring one developer is like hiring a world of developers at your organization. For that price, can you afford not to hire a developer?

The post Why Your Next Hire Should be a Developer appeared first on SiteProNews.