Automate Your AP Process to Improve Auditability

Regardless of the size of your organization or how you structure your accounts payable department (a team, a bookkeeper or an individual company owner), these two guiding principles for establishing successful accounts payable (AP) processes are universal:

1. Ensure the AP process is efficient and accurate.
2. Establish internal controls to safeguard company cash and other investments.

Automating your AP processes allows you to better follow and implement these principles while improving the auditability of processes like expense report and invoice payments.

Improved Expense Report Auditing

Managing travel and entertainment (T&E) expenses is incredibly important for budget-conscious companies. But for companies still dependent on manual processes of matching up paper expense reports with ragtag receipts of all shapes and sizes, ensuring 100% accuracy just isn’t possible.

When these paper receipts come up lost or expense reports turn up late, who truly owns the problem – accounts payable or the employee – can be hard to pinpoint. Add to that the time and subjectivity involved in checking expenses against company compliance policies, and process efficiency wanes.

Automating the expense report process from start to finish not only increases the efficiency and accuracy of AP auditing, it ensures many errors in T&E reports are avoided altogether.

• Digital vs. paper expense report procedures allow instant checks to be made against company policies before an expense form can move forward.
• Spot audits on approved expense forms (by submitter, approver, date range, etc) can be made quickly, with minimal interruption.
• Third party requests to audit (by the “home office,” for example, or by government agencies) can be easily complied with.

Improved Invoice Auditing

Digitizing invoice-related documents can ensure the accuracy of information across multiple documents for easier auditing and provide the ability to set better internal process controls.

• Digitizing purchase orders, receiving reports and vendor invoices allow consistency of information across multiple documents and better enables internal control processes like three-way matching.
• Digitally identifying which employee/employees are responsible for each match control can reward efficiency, pinpoint mistakes or narrow in on deception.
• Automating invoice processes can eliminate (or very quickly reveal errors during auditing) like duplicate payments and over payments...even missed opportunities on early-payment discounts.

Improved Audit Experience

Going through an audit is a lot of work! Not only do you have to worry about getting your day-to-day tasks completed, but you also have to manage and work with the auditors. Digitizing invoices and their related documents in a centralized repository can ensure that you can efficiently provide the information they request, while keeping controls around what they can and can't see.

• Easily create a user account that specifies the exact information that the auditors can see.
• Eliminate the time spent looking for information that needs to be provided.
• Immediately provide audit trails to the auditors for their review.

Automating AP doesn't have to be a challenge! By switching from manual to automated AP processes, you and your team will be able to spend your time on tasks and work that matter.

Want to learn more about how Accounting Automation can make your accounting department more efficient? Find out how DocuPhase can help you increase the audibility of your accounts payable processes by requesting a free demo.