Wednesday 7th May, 2014

In many Accounts Payable departments, matching supplier statements is the least favourite task - mostly because it’s a manual, labourious and time-consuming process. And if a task is the least favourite, you can be sure that there are associated problems...In this case, the largely manual process means that not enough reconciliations are completed, which can then leads to inaccurate supplier balances and a negative impact on cash from missed credits and incorrect postings.  But, if the process can be automated - more supplier accounts can be reconciled, leaving AP professionals free to focus on dealing with the exceptions rather than the chore of trying to find them in the first place. Suppliers also benefit because they have greater clarity on the status of their account - meaning fewer phone calls into AP.

Of course, the process should be straightforward - orders go out, goods are delivered, invoices arrive, payments are made  and statements are reconciled – what could be simpler?  However, as we all know, this straightforward process flow isn’t always so easy.  There are many reasons why the reconciliation and matching process can become a burdensome responsibility fraught with the potential for leakage.  Exceptions to the process through invoice entry errors, returns, changes, disputes or credits for example, will create a mismatch in what the supplier thinks he’s owed, versus what your view of their account is.  So reconciling supplier statements is a key task if you want to have best in class controls in place.

But these days there are tools which take some of the pain of statement matching away – such as the aptly named statementmatching.com. Statementmatching.com automatically reconciles paper, pdf and electronic statements against your accounting records and tells you the status of every single line in seconds. It enables you spend all of your time managing the exceptions and copies of these reconciliations can then be emailed to suppliers, giving them the status of their account and any actions required eg, to request missing invoices/credits. Comprehensive Audit Reports are also provided for internal/external audit compliance, saving you even more time compared to the manual reporting process.

Organisations which make use of this type of automation quite quickly see progress in a number of areas – such as exception management, visibility, data quality and efficiency. Plus, of course where the department is ultimately delivering value to the bottom line, the profile of the accounts payable department is raised to the rest of the finance team and C-level execs for all the right reasons.

Find out more during out webinar on Thursday 12th June 10:30 BST - 7 Reasons to Automate Supplier Statement Reconciliations