Thursday, 23rd May, 2013

Towards the end of a long conference I was a little unsure about the wisdom of sitting in on a session entitled “57 Ways to Increase AP Success” at the IFO Fusion event yesterday. Not five, not ten, but 57 different ways…I hoped there’d be coffee…Still, it was an intriguing title and if there are 57 different ways – I want to be sure I know them too. As it turned out, I wasn’t the only one, as the room soon filled to capacity.

Now...revolutions come in all shapes and sizes – but they normally involve large helpings of three things - noise, disruption and ultimately radical change in one way or another. In Accounts Payable David Griffiths of FISCAL Technologies said that there was just one piece of that jigsaw missing – the noise. For several years AP has been undergoing tremendous change with pressure to squeeze more savings and value out of fewer resources, causing huge disruption along the way. The one thing that’s different on AP’s revolutionary path is the noise it’s creating along the way – or the “AP Voice” as David calls it.

The point that he made was that if you've made savings in AP, improved your processes, implemented and recommended new technology or hit key metrics - then shout about it – develop your own AP voice within the rest of the organisation and raise your value. By doing so, David pointed out that AP staff would effectively be giving themselves the chance to become key members of the finance team – moving away from being purely transactional and adding necessary operational elements too.

As in all revolutions, things have a tendency to get messy – and AP is no different. As David said, there’s been no other time in the history of the industry when accounts payable have had to deal with so many different methods of receiving an invoice. And of course, this adds its own level of complexity to an already challenging environment. Some solution providers are rising to the challenge by the addition of vendor portals to their packages, with some being more intuitive than others and of course the ease of that as a solution would depend on your existing vendor, amongst other things.

Overall though, David pointed out that the trick to improving accounts payable is to look objectively at your organisation and pick key areas, or points of pain that you think you’ll be able to change. Looking at all the areas, all at the same time is impractical and could actually be counter-productive – alienating staff and potentially running roughshod over areas that didn't need to change.

OK, but how does that sit with 57 ways? Well, I needn’t have worried – David sensibly plucked out the top seven points that organisations need to be considering to help them move towards a best-in-class team, which are briefly:

1. Create your own AP Vision, Mission and Goals – lots of AP departments have objectives, but few develop specific VMGs
2. Protect your team – save their time, segregate duties, nominate staff to do certain things at certain times
3. Develop your voice – be proactive, educate other areas of finance and procurement of your value
4. Constant self-monitoring
5. Generate income – it’s not all about paying money out. Re-claim and prevent duplicates, win rebates and discounts
6. Metrics analysis - look at your performance metrics on a regular basis
7. Use at least one technology – purely manual processes increase the chances of fraud and error

For those interested, I’m sure there’s a more in-depth analysis of these key seven points on the FISCAL web site. And apparently there really are 57 different ways to improve AP and they’ve written an e-book to prove it!