Every hotelier aspires to reduce the time needed to process invoices while ensuring all invoices are approved in a timely manner. Accounts payable automation plays a crucial role in doing it efficiently while minimizing the risk of errors in payment processing. It reduces the chance that overpayments or underpayments will be made to vendors, ensures that payments are allocated correctly, reducing the need to reconcile accounts at month-end (and beyond).
With accounts payable automation, hotels can free up valuable resources to focus on other critical issues like customer service and revenue generation. To top it off, automation also helps ensure compliance with tax regulations by providing better documentation of business transactions.
- Reduction in payment processing time (faster)
- Minimizes the chance of errors (reduced costs, fines, or penalties)
- Enables better reporting and compliance tracking (IRS, etc).
- Ensures everything is paid on time (no late fees).
Let’s now well into the 5 Accounts Payable Automation Benefits for Hotels
1. Immediate Invoice Processing
The first benefit you will get from accounts payable automation is the ability to process invoices immediately. Traditionally, companies spend hundreds of hours each month manually entering invoices into their systems before sending them over to accounting. With invoice processing software, all it takes is a few clicks by one person to automatically create the invoice. This saves you time and ensures that no invoices are missed. Moreover, because the invoice goes through several people before payment processing begins, errors can be introduced at any step of the process. However, with automated accounts payable software, every step is verified by machines so there’s virtually no chance of making an error.
2. Minimize Errors
The second benefit you will get from accounts payable automation is the ability to minimize errors. As stated earlier, accountants must manually enter each invoice into their accounting systems before sending them over for approval. Due to sheer volume, mistakes are inevitable in this manual processing system. With automated accounts payable software, though, the entire process is handled automatically by machines. That means that there’s very little room for error.
3. Eliminating the Need to Reconcile Accounts
Automatically processing invoices is a great benefit, but what if you could also eliminate the need to reconcile accounts at month end? With automated accounts payable software, this is an added bonus you’ll get from implementing automation. In today’s business world, there are thousands of transactions that occur every single day. Because it’s nearly impossible for accountants to manually approve and record each transaction in their accounting system, they must rely on having accurate books at the end of every month.
This means that they spend hours verifying totals across various documents to ensure everything matches up correctly. This process is called reconciliation, and it takes time away from valuable tasks. However, a benefit of accounts payable automation is that it allows companies to both record and pay every transaction without the need for reconciliation. This eliminates needless time spent trying to discover accounting errors after the fact.
4. Better Documentation with Automation
The final benefit you will get from automated accounts payable software is better documentation. To track business transactions, many organizations rely on email chains or paper receipts as proof of payment. When this happens, there’s no guarantee that an email thread will contain all of the information necessary to prove a transaction was made or provide clarity in case there’s a dispute down the road. But an added bonus of automated accounts payable software is a built-in document management system. With this feature, businesses have access to searchable records that can be updated throughout the life of a transaction, from start to finish. This ensures you have all the proof necessary to support your business transactions.
5. Time-Saving
Reporting Automation allows for better tracking and reporting capabilities. In addition, automated accounts payable software also comes with valuable reporting capabilities. Instead of manually searching through past documents to generate reports on revenue and expenses, companies can simply access their accounting system online. Then they just click a few buttons and immediately receive valuable information about their profitability by category or region or any other key performance indicator (KPI).
These benefits alone make it worth looking into an automated account payable software solution for your business. For example, if you spend hours each month manually entering invoices and approving payments, you could be using that time instead to grow your business and generate more revenue.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Now that aforementioned is pretty commendable benefits, so now the point is how you do it efficiently.
Nimble Property leverages Artificial Intelligence, its automated Accounts Payable solution makes your entire bill entry process touchless and multi-level approval possible. Submit your paper invoices to Nimble electronically and the system utilizes OCR Scanning and AI to automatically read, convert and map them into the right bill entry fields: credit card, bill payment and check. After then, at your convenience, you or your team can seamlessly view and approve them. By which dramatically you’ll improve the financial visibility and control over the AP management process.
