Choosing an AP automation solution that integrates with your accounting and ERP platforms is important for system efficiency and accuracy. An integrated accounts payable system can enable seamless data flow, reducing manual entry and errors while providing real-time visibility into financial data.
Integrated AP allows your team to maintain existing workflows while benefiting from automation, improving decision-making and reporting. Without an integrated accounts payable system, your department risks disruptions and costly manual processes.
5 Benefits of an Integrated Accounts Payable System
A well-integrated AP system helps ensure continuity, efficiency, and better financial management. Organizations may experience the following benefits when integrating automated AP with their existing financial management systems.
1. Reduced Costs and Improved Profits
Manual invoice and payment processes consume valuable resources, requiring AP teams to spend significant time coding invoices, obtaining approvals, and processing checks. The associated costs of managing paper-based systems can be substantial.
Integrating AP automation with existing accounting systems can reduce costs by eliminating manual tasks, minimizing errors, and streamlining workflows. AP automation software is designed to improve efficiency, accelerate invoice processing, and ensure timely payments, leading to better cash flow management.
This can boost productivity, reduce operational expenses, and ultimately enhance profitability for the business.
2. Improved Efficiency
Integrated AP can offer significant time savings by automating key processes. Advanced tools like optical character recognition (OCR) and artificial intelligence (AI) can extract invoice data and match it to purchase orders, reducing manual data entry.
AP systems with an embedded payment experience allow AP teams to pay suppliers directly within their ERP system. Integrating systems can enable real-time data exchange, linking job and cost code information and automating reconciliation, reducing the need to continuously toggle between systems.
3. Better System Availability
With the increasing prevalence of remote work, obtaining necessary approvals for invoices and issuing checks can become challenging. Transitioning your accounting and AP processes to the cloud streamlines these tasks and provides real-time access to data and reporting from anywhere.
Integrating AP automation software with existing accounting and ERP systems improves system availability by ensuring unified data flow and real-time access to financial information. This reduces downtime caused by manual processes and system incompatibility, supporting continuous operations and providing users with up-to-date information for decision-making across platforms.
4. Enhanced Visibility
With integrated accounts payable, your team can establish and configure automated routing rules that track every action with a comprehensive audit trail. Payment methods, statuses, and histories are accessible at any time.
Concerns about losing control over payments with most AP automation solutions are unfounded. Processes are automated while your team maintains full control over payment approvals.
Detailed reporting features allow you to track all invoices using filters, including those still pending approval. For example, you can quickly view how long an invoice has been with an individual. Reminder notifications are sent automatically, enabling you to address delays before they impact your financials.
5. Strengthened Supplier Relationships
Nurturing relationships with essential suppliers is a key priority for many businesses. Some integrated AP systems allow your team to outsource portions of your supplier management processes by handling vendor inquiries, payment follow-ups, and reconciliation exceptions, reducing the burden on your internal team.
Integrating AP software with your ERP and accounting systems can help streamline payment processing, delivering more timely and accurate payments. Integrated AP enhances transparency and provides visibility into payment statuses, fostering trust and communication, which strengthens long-term supplier partnerships.
Learn More About Integrated Accounts Payable
AvidXchange offers 240 financial system integrations, including popular options like QuickBooks and NetSuite as well as more niche industry-specific tools like M3 and Rent Manager. AvidXchange works effortlessly with your accounting system, allowing you to automate your AP without upending your current systems.
With AvidXchange API-integrated accounts payable, invoice and payment data and ledger balances import nightly. All reporting can remain the same since AvidXchange pushes invoice and payment data into the accounting system automatically.
AvidXchange enables customizable workflows, so your organization can maintain existing processes and approval sequences, including exceptions. You won’t lose control of the elements of your system that are working for you – but you will lose the frustration of manual processes.
Learn more about integrated AP by connecting with one of our experts.