Let’s talk about Las Vegas buffets (pre-pandemic, of course).
Depending on which casino you go to, the up-front cost of one admission into a dinner buffet can seem pretty expensive. You’ve already waited in a line that doesn’t move just to get into the actual area. Then, when you get to the register, you’re hit with the sticker shock. For a brief moment, your very rational not-sleep-deprived-at-all mind says, “Is this really worth what I’m paying?”
Then you get inside.
“Sweet mother of foie gras, is all this for ME?!”
Yes. Yes, it is my dear conquistador epicurean. It’s all for you. However much you want, whenever you want it. And if you can’t find something, it’s probably there, anyway.
“You mean I can put hot dogs and lobster on the same plate?” Yes, you can do that.
“A taco, pizza slice, pork chop combination plate?” Yup. That’s in, too.
“You mean ANYTHING?” Ugh, yeah, you’ve got the hang of it.
Okay, let’s leave your inner monologue in the prime rib line and talk about why this experience matters.
Data in business is like a Las Vegas buffet. It’s easier than ever to get lots of different types of data about your business for what is ultimately a small cost upfront (even if it doesn’t look like it). Just recently, a report from a Harvard Business Review Analytic Services Pulse survey showed almost 90% of respondents increasing their amounts of data collection over the past two years.
Once you get that data, though, the trick is figuring out how to use it in such a way that doesn’t bog you down. We want data to work for us, not against us. Like any new venture you put into your business, using data requires you to go into the endeavor with a set of purposes, things you know you want to get out of using data. That’s really the first big hurdle in making data work for you instead of against you.
Here’s how to make data be a team player instead of a diva:
Automate Collection
Customize Reports
Allow Software to Adapt
Get Faster Than Your Competitors
Automate Your Collection Technique
Find an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) program out there that specializes in one or more types of data collection that you need. Programs like Workday, Capella, and E-trade all have their pros and cons. Research them and find the or ones which fit your needs best.
Target The Reporting
Pretty much all automation software allows you to customize what you see in reports. Use those programs to add calculations and set up algorithms so that they highlight the key data points you need the most.
Let The Software Learn
Quite a few ERPs come ready to adapt once they start working for you. As the ERPs start creating reports at your request, they begin to learn what to expect at particular times each month. In turn, because the program knows what you’ll be asking for, it’ll automate its functions to match those needs. If you guide the software smartly, the ERP can eventually do a ton of automating at the end of the month and leave you with the small task of locating anomalies–an incredible timesaver.
Get Ahead Of The Competition
So that survey we mentioned earlier? It also showed 77% of respondents relied on manual processes to collect and use data. Most of those respondents expressed a clear directive to move to automation within the next three years. In other words, the field is starting to figure it out–manual processing is slow, cumbersome, and inefficient. Every day you spend on manual processes means another day you lose ground to a company that automates everything. When you consider the amount of data you need to stay competitive in the first place, it quickly becomes clear that no one on this planet can process all that data manually. The computers are there to help.
The old saying is that you can sometimes have too much of a good thing. Whether it’s food or data, that can be true. Our eyes get so big, and we get so excited that we forget what we’re supposed to do for a hot minute. Then, as we grasp the gravity of what we’re doing, we get intimidated and spooked. But it doesn’t have to be like that all the time.
For business data, knowing how to avoid the inefficient binge can save you extra time and cost on top of the time you’re already losing to manual AP and AR procedures. That’s a big reason why you need to automate ASAP.
Reach out to us if you have questions! We’re ready to help you take the plunge. Let us know how it’s going on our social media pages, and keep checking our blog for more info.
The accounts payable department in most organizations, has to deal with paper and paperless invoices coming from many different channels with different document formats, and their clerks have to figure out how to process each invoice.
For example, an AP clerk needs to identify if the document received from the vendor is a supplemental document related to an existing invoice or if it’s a new PO or Non-PO-based invoice. Once the document is classified, the document needs to be routed appropriately for processing. For example, Non-PO-based invoices require Users to provide additional information such as accounting information and comments as well as approvals before the invoice can be ready for payment.
This whole process is time-consuming
Accounts payable automation solutions should digitally monitor the invoice, allow companies to store and retrieve an invoice image, choose a predefined workflow for processing, allow Non-PO invoices with simple one-click solutions, and finally allow AP & Non-AP Users to collaborate throughout the lifecycle of the invoice.
At oAppsNET, we take a holistic approach to improving your AP process by first focusing on the people who will be the champions of your digital transformation process. The second steps are to review all AP processes without any technology to optimize the overall flow before applying technologies that actually improve the process
We start with listening to The Clients AP Team Members’ pain points. Then we architect a new business process with or without technology to reduce overall AP processing costs and maximize supplier discounts.
We re-architect the process flows without assuming any technology and then only applied technology when it actually improves the process versus forcing a technology when it was not required.
Finally, we focus on proven time and money-saving tasks and apply pinpoint technologies to improve your AP process:
Simplified AP Process Flows Inter-departmental Collaboration Automated Approvals Advanced Invoice Routing Personalized GL Coding Templates Enhanced Duplicate Invoice Checking Improved Invoice Visibility Identify Issues Before Importing into your ERP system Provide Self-Service Pages To Relieve AP of Common Requests
By following these steps, your company can transform your AP process and it will improve business relationships with your Suppliers and Partners, boost internal productivity for both AP and the Users of AP, reduce the number of days to process complex invoices, and thus increase profitability.
Ready to make a change?
Whether it’s a digital transformation or a transition from manually to an automated process either can bear and generate its own set of difficulties.
We understand that making these types of decisions take time and a lot of resource planning, contact us and find out if you qualify for an AP Automation Pre-Health Check.
Your humble blogger, hard as it is to admit, can be a stubborn fellow when learning a new video game. This problem goes way back to childhood.
For years, your blogger would scoff at his younger brother who insisted you could hop the wall in at the very beginning of a lap in Mario Kart 64’s Wario Stadium. “Nonsense! It’s not possible!”
But then the younger brother would demonstrate that shortcut not just once, or twice, but all three laps of the race. His final time shaved off more than 3 minutes off his personal best, which is an eternity in Mario Kart time.
So your blogger started practicing. And eventually, he got so good at it to the point where he never messes it up, even to this day. It just goes to show that sometimes new ideas that seem like a bridge too far really do end up being revolutionary (relatively speaking, pardon the pun).
But why bring up any of this? Well, this story can function as a modern-day allegory for rethinking payment automation. The shortcut on Lap 1 is payment automation. In this allegory, I am the younger brother telling you that payment automation is not only possible but consistently awesome. You, dear reader, are the stubborn blogger as a kid. Now it’s the younger brother’s turn to enlighten you once more.
Here’s why you should automate payment immediately:
Speed
Accuracy
Data
(Yeah, yeah, I know it forms the acronym SAD, but it’s far from anything sad! Trust me!)
Life Moves Pretty Fast…
The most noticeable effect you’ll see right away from payment automation an improvement in invoice approval rate. That’s going to speed up a lot. Under the old manual regimes of most companies, unpaid invoices start to pile up because they simply can’t clear them out fast enough. The process is too slow, too cumbersome, and the best employees are only human when being asked to do something way beyond what’s expected of them.
Unpaid invoices can disrupt the daily flow of your company and can damage reputations if they start to affect the speed at which you do business.
By putting in payment automation, you’re cutting out a lot of that legwork because the computer has got you covered.
From Way Downtown, Bang!
Maybe it’s age shows, but your blogger gets extraordinarily happy when something new goes perfectly right the very first time. Consider it one of those serendipitous life chances. You don’t expect it, but you’re over the moon when it does.
Automating payments can give you this experience, too. When you use software with basic algorithms, you’re simply going to be far more accurate every single time you process an invoice. A human employee, even your best one, is going to make an occasional mistake because stuff happens sometimes. It doesn’t mean that person’s a failure by any stretch at all! It’s just that even the most reliable detail-oriented people can’t get it right all the time. Computers on the other hand have a far better chance at making that happen.
Besides, think about how much easier everyone will be resting once they realize that payments won’t be overlooked or missed. No one will have to come into the office knowing that a simple oversight can wreck the day’s progress. The software will have you covered.
Give Me “ALL” The Data
Hunches work occasionally on the job, but the long run suggests you’re better off using data to inform your decisions. By using automation software, programs can pull pretty much any kind of report you’re looking for.
You can often filter this data, too. You can apply a set of conditions for any given situation and see how your business is performing. Then, you can clear those conditions and try a new set. Simply put, if you want to know how your business is doing in any scenario, payment automation software can be a critical source of information. That’s smart business decision-making.
Is it apprehension that’s stopping you? What’s the point in waiting? Make the switch to payment automation today. Let us know how it’s going on our social media pages, and keep checking our blog for more info.
Okay, be honest–when everything started to open up again, you were wary of how “normal” things would be. Once you realized that some of the absolute basic actions in a store were done, you were forced to confront reality. There truly is a new normal.
Now, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
stack of multicolored credit cards on black background
Let’s take payment forms, for example. Even prior to the pandemic, we were progressing towards being a cashless society. Cash takes too long to get out of an ATM, too long to get out of a wallet or purse, and too long to count out. (Okay, not really, but that’s the complaint we’re supposed to share with each other, right?) Credit cards, on the other hand, are efficient and easy because we’ve somehow found a way to reduce the truly laborious insertion of a card into a slot with a simple tap.
Everything we’ve said so far is largely from a consumer’s perspective. What about the business perspective, though?
With cashless payment now becoming the norm, it’s on you to make sure you can take payment in enough forms so that you don’t lose customers. All it takes is one customer to go into your business, be told they can’t use a particular card with you, and then they never come back because they found someone else who was ready for them. (To be fair, you’ve done that before as a customer, right? Pretty much all of us have.)
So, with that said, let’s talk about credit cards today. Taking credit cards for payment (and using them, too) is not as simple as saying, “Just use a credit card.” Under our current model of credit cards, some cards are more widely accepted than others, some cards are trusted more by banks, and some cards just have better security features than others. As a business owner, it helps to know what’s out there so that you can maximize efficiency in both giving and accepting payment.
When considering the use of credit cards, you need to weigh: Security features Efficiency Fringe benefits
Keeping It Safe One of the nice things about credit cards is that you can put spending limits on them to prevent abuse. If you have a credit card for employee spending, you don’t have to worry about employees taking advantage of the card because of the limits you put on them. You also get reports that itemize every purchase, which means you know exactly who is buying what every time that card gets used.
Banks impose spending limits, too (i.e., credit lines). In essence, credit cards are like very short-term loans from banks. An institution says, “We know you’re good for the money at the end of the month, so we’ll take care of this purchase right now.” As long as you’re paying off the balance fully on each monthly statement, you never have to worry about interest accruing on your account.
In addition, if your card number gets compromised, most banks and credit card companies are pretty good about identifying irregularities and shutting down the card until you know what’s going on.
Nothing about any of what we’ve said so far is earth-shattering. Plastic credit cards have been around for decades. The true advancement in security, though, is the advent of virtual credit cards. Virtual credit cards have even more security controls than plastic cards because they have built-in reconciliation features for your accounts payable department. Your AP team can also tie specific single-use CC numbers to individual suppliers with the virtual cards.
Simply put, it sure seems like secure payments via credit card prevents headaches.
Efficiency But if credit cards are safer and faster than an exchange of cash or money orders, then why don’t more businesses use credit cards for both their spending and their payment acceptance?
This one’s easy.
The answer is old habits die hard.
When you’re in a rut, change is tough. New ideas get relegated to the back burner and creativity gets stifled because the boss just needs things to get done.
The thing is, implementing a credit card spending procedure into your AP department is exactly the kind of effort that requires more time up front and very little maintenance on the back end. When you make credit card spending the primary method of providing funds to suppliers, you’re saving hours and hours of tedious paperwork. Offering that same level of convenience to your customers keeps them coming back to you, too (and makes your accounts receivable team very happy to do less paperwork, too).
Don’t forget, too, that most businesses see lots of turnover in suppliers during a given year. Every time you get a new supplier, you have to confirm payment acceptance. Also, you constantly have to maintain accurate info about payment with the suppliers you stay with, too. If everyone leaned more on credit cards, this nuisance would get lessened, too.
Benefits In a cash transaction, money changes hands, goods/services are provided, and the transaction is done. Credit cards provide incentives far beyond what basic cash offers. Depending on which cards you use, some offer big rebates for frequent use. Others offer points that can be spent on free airline miles (hello, business trips, we’ve missed you). The bottom line is that there are cards out there just waiting to give you things for using them.
It doesn’t take a math whiz to know that if you’re getting money back or getting some tangible benefit without having to spend any more money than you already do, then it’s probably a good deal. Responsible credit card use is a good deal. If you’re paying off the balance, not accruing interest, and getting points/rebates in return, you’re coming out ahead.
What’s your theory on why more businesses haven’t made the move toward credit card spending? Let us know on our social media pages, and keep checking our blog for more info. Twitter LinkedIn
It’s usually considered a good business practice that when you write an email that is about to go out to the entire company, you typically have someone else read it over once just to make sure it sounds good. When we look at things four and five times, we get to a point where errors don’t even register anymore. Getting that second set of eyes can make all the difference between writing something like “Let’s eat Grandma” and “Let’s eat, Grandma.” So your colleague gives it the once over, says it’s good to go, and you send it off.
FREEZE THIS MOMENT
Let’s think about what we just did here. We wrote something meant to be consumed by lots of readers. We constructed and revised. We brought in someone else to check our work. Then we finally sent the message.
In essence, we asked our colleague to perform a test on something we built. It’s a good idea because if we distribute something to lots of people and it hasn’t been tested, one error potentially becomes one hundred errors. Not great.
When your company decides to automate its operations with special software, you need to take similar steps to ensure that you’re giving workable solutions to the rest of your team. The software needs testing. However, this testing takes much more time than just scanning over an email as in the example above.
Many times, you won’t be able to cobble together a team to do this testing because they already have their own responsibilities to do during the day. For large-scale automation testing, you need to consider outsourcing this task to a quality assurance testing company. In other words, a company that specializes in testing software.
Allow us to give you a quick rundown on how to go about outsourcing your testing needs:
1. Know what an automated test does
2. Prepare your test automation process to be outsourced
3. Analyze the results
Step 1–Know What Automated Tests Do And Can’t Do
An automated test is one that can be repeated frequently and efficiently. They also produce the same results every time provided the conditions of the test remain the same. However, they can also be set up to manipulate different variables at different times, which ends up giving you valuable information about what to expect when the unexpected happens. Last, but certainly not least, automated tests provide you unbiased information about the viability of the software.
Of course, because the tests are automated, they still leave out some potentially valuable information. User preferences such as how easy it is to interface with the software are not part of automated tests because computers are not substitutes for human opinions. Remember this fact when considering the results of testing automation.
Step 2–Prepare Your Test Automation Process For Outsourcing
Before you can outsource your testing, you’ll need to set up some conditions that can actually be tested. Take some data that would be a realistic representation of something you’re trying to automate. Then, make a list of the particular variables you’d like to analyze. In other words, give the tester lots of different ways to run the software so that you can see the widest range of possibilities of what the software can actually do for you.
This task is a great one for anyone in your company who’s good at coming up with creative yet still plausible “what if?” questions. Brainstorm with your team all of the different ways the data could be manipulated via variables.
Something else to consider is the kind of data you want from your software. What kind of data would be the most empowering, informative data available to your staff? Ask your team to help you figure this out. You can eventually make a list of the types of reports you’d want to know from your data. Outsourced testers can get any and all of this information for you.
Once you know what you want from your testing, it’s time to have the outsourced tester run all of the trials. Sit back, let them do their thing, and then wait for the results.
Step 3–Analyze The Results
Lots of different testing companies have their own ways of reporting results. However, many will often rely on some sort of pass/fail mechanism. Your top priority in this stage is understanding what the software actually did give the conditions you supplied. If the results come back and all of the tests are listed with a “pass”, that’s a good sign you may have the right software selection for your company.
If you see lots of “fails”, however, then it’s possible you may not have the right software for your needs. Revisit the conditions to see if it’s truly the software’s inability to run certain tests or if it’s something else you haven’t considered.
One more thing about this step–if this software is something that you developed within your own company, then your developers will be most interested in reading about the passes and fails. They’ll likely look at the logs and figure out what went wrong before fixing it. Once they do that, it’s time to repeat Step 2 and send out the software for testing again.
It’s Still Worth It
Is it a pain to have to look elsewhere to get something done for you? Sometimes it is. However, when you consider the volume of work that needs to be done for an automation software that will ultimately save you thousands of hours and wasted efforts down the road, the extra cost of outsourcing might very well be worth your time. As we all know, sometimes it’s worth absorbing a larger cost upfront to reap big-time rewards in the long term. Let us know about your adventures with test automation outsourcing on our social media pages, and keep checking our blog for more info.
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