The highlights:
- Integrating accounts payable (AP) with enterprise resource planning software (ERP) and artificial intelligence (AI) transforms payables from a manual task into a strategic cash-flow function.
- AI-driven, paperless AP improves visibility, accuracy, and control across cash flow and your general ledger.
- ERP, AI, and AP work together to deliver efficient, resilient financial operations
A growing number of companies are acknowledging a key financial reality—streamlined cash flow management helps them operate efficiently as business becomes more complex. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems give leaders better visibility into financial and operational complexity. AI-driven cash flow intelligence solutions give companies the tools to apply those insights and respond to that complexity.
Yet many companies overlook one of the most impactful opportunities to improve cash flow efficiency: automating accounts payable (AP). Even those using ERP systems and AI tools often still manually input and reconcile AP. Blending AP with these tools digitizes the entire process and provides substantial benefits to managing your ledger.
Eliminating manual tasks through automated, integrated AP ensures greater efficiency, accuracy, visibility, and control over the process. Take a look at four specific benefits of syncing accounts payable automation with your ERP and AI-driven cash flow tools:
1. Take your accounts payable paperless.
Receiving invoices through multiple channels—mail, fax, email, and manual handoffs—creates tracking challenges for AP teams. Misplaced invoices may incur late fees and could leave vendors unpaid. Manual systems are more vulnerable to fraud, and they make reconciling and auditing more difficult.
Automation gives you a paperless AP process that enables online invoicing, approvals, and payments. Paired with AI-driven invoice recognition and validation, ERP-integrated payables systems can also pinpoint anomalies, identify potential duplicates, and minimize exception handling before invoices even reach the approval stage.
2. Overhaul user roles to use employees’ time better.
ERPs typically assign a role to each user, limiting employee access to certain operations. This structure can create inefficiencies. For example, if an employee generates a purchase order, but the role they have means they can’t check on the status of that order, your team loses valuable time finding someone with access who can.
Overhauling roles with an automated AP process can make better use of everybody’s time. Set the right access across the entire process, from invoice receipt and approval status to payment execution. Then, add AI in accounts payable to further boost visibility. Systems can be coded to automatically route low-risk invoices and to require human involvement less often. This helps your team focus their time and attention.
3. Gain real-time visibility into your payables.
Using multiple payment methods and systems makes it difficult to maintain an accurate general ledger balance. You’ll have to pore over credit card and bank statements, search records for payments that haven’t cleared yet, and then manually reconcile any loose ends you find in a spreadsheet. By the time you finish balancing everything, more payments will still be uncleared—putting you right back at square one.
With an automated AP solution, payments are synchronized in real time with your ERP general ledger balance. You’ll have an accurate view of account balances for all payment methods, as well as the information required to make informed cash-flow decisions.
Combine that with AI-driven, cash-flow intelligence, and you can unlock the ability to continuously update forecasts as invoices are approved or payment timing changes—providing accurate, up-to-date views of cash obligations for all payment types.
4. Create a better audit trail.
Just as receiving invoices through multiple channels makes it hard to maintain an orderly approval and pay process, conducting a financial audit on transactions that happened that way is also challenging.
An automated AP process completes and tracks each task electronically, helping you establish a consistent workflow and maintain a clear audit trail.
Integrating an automated AP process into your ERP enables your company to reap a number of benefits. You’ll eliminate duplicate invoice payments and other manual errors, plus you’ll be able to take advantage of discounts and guarantee payments according to your cash flow strategy. AI fortifies this efficiency by recognizing and learning approval patterns, identifying bottlenecks, and supporting stronger internal controls without slowing down operations. Coordinating your ERP, AI, and AP automation can deliver integrated benefits across risk, efficiency, profitability, and vendor experience.
Switch to automated payables.
Ask your relationship manager how Truist can help your business integrate automated payables into your ERP.
