Successful operation of your business’s daily finances, in the form of your Accounts Payable (AP) and Accounts Receivable (AR), comes down to efficiently managing liability on both ends of your cashflow. Unaccounted receivables can quickly limit your business’s finances and slow down general operations, while inefficiently managed payables can expose your business to liabilities that can challenge your ability to function.
Luckily, there are options available to address these challenges with ease when you power your payables and receivables with the freedom of automation. When you automate your approach to these routine transactions, you not only eliminate accounting liability, but you save time and gain cost efficiencies as well. Read on to learn about three key solutions and the benefits of automating your accounts payable and accounts receivable.
Invoice-to-Pay
Converting to an integrated invoice-to-pay AP solution gives your business a number of advantages. By automating the process of collecting, approving, tracking and paying invoices, you increase efficiency at every stage while reducing processing costs and payment risk. You also improve control of outgoing cashflow and internal accounting.
Through invoice-to-pay, active synchronization with your accounting software reduces manual payment entry and posting, freeing up valuable time and shortening payment processing periods. In turn, the ability to precisely choose the timing and means of vendor payment allows your company to take advantage of exclusive early pay discounts and leverage even greater rebates.
Controlled Disbursement
Ready to take the uncertainty out of cash forecasting? A service like Controlled Disbursement provides daily early-morning notifications of funding requirements for checks presented for posting that can keep you on top of your cash position.
The ability to quickly and confidently assess the status of checks can allow for the elimination of idle balances, which helps to maximize available funds. Visibility to available funds when using Controlled Disbursement in conjunction with a Zero Balance Account—more on that in the next section—helps you maximize your available cash to make investments or pay down loans.
Zero Balance Account
If your organization has multiple accounts with excess balances, consolidating them into one concentration account represents a major step towards managing your cashflow in a simple and timely manner. With Zero Balance Accounts, you can choose to consolidate excess balances from multiple accounts into one concentration account at the end of each business day. This greatly reduce the workload by minimizing the time required to forecast cash needs and administer manual account transfers. The key to streamlining any system is to simplify and expedite the movement of funds.
Workload is also reduced. By eliminating the need for manual account balance transfers, the risk of overdrafts is largely eliminated when funding daily disbursement automatically from a concentration account. Particularly when combined with Controlled Disbursement and Invoice-to-Pay, Zero Balance Account provides a comprehensive, dynamic solution for optimal management of AR and AP operations.
The speed at which business moves today requires a solid plan to increase efficiency and staff productivity. That makes automating AP and AR a natural first step. By implementing solutions like Invoice-to-Pay, Controlled Disbursements and Zero Balance Accounts, your firm can realize reduced processing time and costs, get greater visibility into your cash flow and help reduce the risk of errors.
Are you interested in learning more? The specialists at California Bank & Trust can help. Start here to read more on automating receivables and payables. Then contact us for more details.[cite::171::cite] [cite::172::cite]