Tip #4: Fast-Track Your Approval Process

You can improve your AP department by speeding up the invoice approval process. Considered as being slow and inefficient in the majority of organizations, the approval process can cost companies a lot of money without realizing it. Remember Tip #2: Improving Cash Flow? Leveraging early-payment discounts helps to improve cash flow but lengthy approval processes can make hitting those targets nearly impossible. One way to speed up the approval process is to automate it with workflow software.

Workflow management allows you to redefine and reconstruct the steps of long business processes so that time required executing tasks is minimized and the time between tasks is essentially eliminated.

Benefits of a Workflow Management Solution:

• Improved business efficiency – Eliminate repetitive and unnecessary tasks for better use of time, capital and internal resources, resulting in significant reduction of financial loss.
• Improved understanding of business processes within the organization – This leads to better communication between employees, departments, and between your organization and valued customers. It allows you to simplify the channels through which your company communicates with each other.
• Reduced administrative errors – Workflow solutions track the business process and alerts users and administrators to work items that need to be completed so they never get lost in the process.
• Improved compliance and auditing – Workflow management leverages all the security, scale-ability, reliability and integration options of a document management system to guarantee the integrity and availability of the data.

What do you do to ensure quick approval processes in your AP department? Do you have a workflow management solution in place? Tell us in the comment box below!