Accounts Payable in the Digital Age
As we charge full bore into 2013 it's easy to see the great digital advances we've made over the years. Smart phones have fundamentally changed the way the world works, email is a primary driver of business and nearly all the information you want available at your fingertips. I say nearly,because a large portion of the business world is still HEAVILY tied to paper. Businesses pay hundreds, if not thousands of dollars monthly simply to manage the paper that they receive. Pieces of paper are rubber stamped, manually written on, mailed to different locations and even printed out when they started as PDFs.
How did this happen? We're supposed to be living in the age of the Internet, “the age where data is sent freely an openly.” Yet, despite this promise, paper is still the king in most Accounts Payable departments.
In the AP world paper is still king for one primary reason: Paper is universal. If you run a business the ability to process paper documents is STILL a requirement. Once you make the leap to digital formats “compatibility” becomes a 4-letter word. Compatibility is the reason we still live in a paper based AP world. No government mandate in the US is going to seta standard for digital processing and no single company is going to saturate the market to the level that paper did in the past.
As a business owner, what do you do? How do you deal with multiple formats, and the unpleasant reality that paper is going to be around for a long, long time? The answer is fairly simple: flexibility and an “opensource” philosophy.
This philosophy is how we've set up our AP processing platform.
Flexibility.
The Fidesic AP processing system is designed to work with ALL of the standard invoicing methods. Email? Great. Paper? Lets get that digital ASAP. You want to send it directly? Here's how. This strategy means your AP staff doesn't have to worry about maintaining 5 different workflow types. Your staff doesn't have to try to convert everything to paper to maintain a simple process. All you have to do is get the invoice, in whatever format, into our approval system. Once it's in, the process is easy for the approvers, and easy for the staff to get into your ERP system. Our format is directly compatible with Dynamics GP, so your staff doesn't have to try to jamand analog approval into a digital system.
“Open Source” Philosophy.
I put the term open source in quotes intentionally. Having a truly open source system is likely not in your company's best interest for maintaining secure documents. Using the lessons of that philosophy, you can getyour business ready to take on any challenge. There will likely never be a new “standard” for AP invoice processing like there was with paper in the last century. You need to have a system with the built in flexibility to take whatever your vendors want to provide. Our Fidesic platform is built with an API that is EXTEMELY easy to work with. If you have vendors who want to make adirect connection with your business, we give them the tools to do so. We want to make your AP system able to deal with whatever format you may encounter, to make your business run fast and efficient.
The transition away from paper has been much slower than what people have predicted. This means you are going to need a system that can both handle paper, and transition your company to a paperless world. Simply scanning paper into a digital form is no longer good enough. The market is slowly shifting, is your business ready to embrace this change?