The Top 5 Challenges of Accounts Payable and its Solutions
How do you get the most value out of payments while addressing challenges like inefficiency, lack of spend optimisation, out-of-policy spending, and compliance issues?
And worse, these are only some of the many account payable challenges mentioned, where there are, in fact, many more that lies beyond.
In this article, we address the top 5 accounts payable challenges and how you can overcome them with expense management solutions.
Read on to find out more.
Challenge #1: Processes are highly manual in nature
Manual data entry is one of the top challenges of accounts payables. These include the usage of paper invoices, even typing transaction details one by one, and even the process of accounting reconciliations.
These can be easily streamlined with automation, especially payables software that can easily settle the work for you.
Challenge #2: Lack of spending visibility
This issue is a constant in accounts payables. Be it employee spending, payments to vendors and suppliers, or even miscellaneous expenses, there is always a need for more oversight over these areas. You don’t exactly know how, when, and why money is leaving your organisation.
With an all-in-one dashboard and platform to consolidate all this information at once and in real-time, CFOs and finance teams can gain full visibility over the company's spending, leaving room for better forecasting and planning for future growth.
Challenge #3: Compliance issues
Similar to how there is a lack of visibility over employee spending or vendor payments, companies also need to have a robust payment processing system, and submit through custom approval flows or proper review.
This helps ensure that there is a proper digitalised audit trail and a high level of compliance maintained throughout the payment processing.
Challenge #4: Complex digital payments
Digital payments are typically very complicated, and that’s where virtual corporate cards come in to help streamline the process for companies.
With payables software like Spenmo, they allow businesses to create unlimited virtual cards for their employees to process payments on behalf of the company,
In addition, CFOs and finance teams are able to establish full control over these virtual cards with spending limits and merchant locks. It can also track transactions made with it in real-time so that it can be matched accordingly to a particular merchant, vendor or expense category.
Challenge #5: Rigid bill payments
Financial resources of a company and supplier relationships can be positively impacted by giving the company more flexibility in how they pay suppliers.
Typically, the bill payment process is very rigid, where the payment will only move along when the purchase order (PO) and invoice is received. And even then, if a check is deposited, both parties must wait for the cheque to clear before the funds can be distributed. In the end, bill payments may get delayed.
It is important to pay on time and once the invoice is processed. Adopting a payables software that automates bill payments allows companies to import the details of the invoice automatically and even schedule it for payment to vendors easily.
Solving these challenges with an all-in-one payables software
As you can tell, most of these challenges can be solved by using an integrated payables software that grasps automation at its core. Even if these are not the specific pain points faced by your finance teams, we’re sure they would be fairly similar.
That’s where we step in.
Spenmo is an all-in-one payables solution for your business needs, with a dashboard that contains automated bill payment features, custom approval flows, efficient receipt management, seamless accounting reconciliation, and more.
Our vision is to help finance teams like yours gain visibility, comfort, and control over how, when, and why money is leaving your organisation.
Talk to us to find out how you can get rid of these accounts payable challenges today!
*Disclaimer: This article is for general education purposes only. Spenmo does not make any representation, assurance, or warranty, express or implied, as to its services or products offered in this article. For the avoidance of doubt, Spenmo does not purport to issue any credit cards and issues only business corporate cards, which function as debit cards.