Building a Compelling Case for AP Automation

As budget season approaches, businesses must navigate an ever-changing landscape of priorities—including accurately forecasting next year’s spending. This includes things like employee salaries, facility overhead, overall cash flow, and more.  

This can also include the decision to bring on new software—namely, AP automation.  

AP automation has emerged as an essential tool for transforming AP departments into streamlined, cost-saving operations. It works to empower organizations to thrive in an increasingly digital world. Despite this, getting financial decision-makers and the C-Suite to buy into this solution’s many benefits isn’t always easy.  

That’s where our AP automation-focused business case comes in, helping you and your team easily demonstrate the many ways AP automation solves existing back-office pain points all while delivering an attractive ROI. 

Check out our framework to secure the green light for AP automation from your CFO! 

Crafting a Business Case for AP Automation for Any Organization 

A CFO or C-Suite will have several questions about adopting AP automation, like: 

• What’s the overall cost of this system? 

• How long will it take to implement successfully? 

• Which departments will be directly impacted?  

• Can this solution scale to grow with our organization? 

• How will this impact our vendor relationships? 

By building your case, you’ll be prepared to answer not only these questions but also be well-versed in highlighting the additional benefits of implementing AP automation—and the risks that delays and inaction can bring to your organization.  

Follow the guidelines to prep your business case and win your executive team over to the side of automation! 

Determine Priorities and Identify Pain Points 

Having already done your own research on AP automation, you’re itching to bring its efficiency, cost-savings, and accuracy to your team and business at large. To convince financial stakeholders, however, you’ll need to do more than shout its virtues from the rooftops.  

A few things to consider: 

• What current struggles are happening in the AP department? 

• How would you define success with AP automation? 

• How would your executive team define that success? 

If your AP team is—like 60% of other AP teams—still relying on manual data entry or performing record-keeping through Excel, it’s likely even the most basic processes are tedious, time-consuming, and error-prone. Employee time lost to repetitive tasks and other inefficiencies isn’t just counterproductive—it's a waste of money.  

If it takes longer than a few seconds to clear invoices for payment and even longer to get your vendors paid, you’re falling behind your competitors who have already adopted AP automation. Given the importance of vendor relationships to overall business health, ensuring that your organization is armed with seamless, convenient payment methods is key.  

Eliminating these inefficiencies and pain points is most likely a high priority for your financial leadership. Luckily, an end-to-end automation solution can cover the entire procure-to-pay cycle, streamlining processes and improving accuracy for a noticeable uptick in employee performance and financial health for your business.  

Evaluate Opportunity Costs 

Now that you’ve established that relying on an AP automation solution will remove manual, mundane tasks from important team members’ daily plates, it’s time to establish the other positives this tool can bring to your business.  

With this additional time in their days, your AP team will now have the time to focus on higher-value initiatives that instantly boost not only their productivity but also your business’s cash flow.  

This can look like: 

• Automated payments that reduce delays and processing errors, which in turn improve your company’s overall straight-through-processing rate.  

• Seamless invoice management from capture to remittance, driving accuracy rate up and processing time down.  

• Faster, more accurate payments to your vendors will improve your strategic relationships with them, resulting in the potential for dynamic discounts for early payments or even more favorable contract negotiations for your business.  

Identifying how much those discounts add up to over the course of a month, the savings early, discounted payments can provide your business, and the obvious benefits of reducing invoice errors are tangible numbers that you can provide your CFO or C-suite to show the opportunity costs of bringing in an AP automation solution.  

Outline Current AP Costs 

Your business case shouldn’t just include your vision of the future state of your AP team—it needs to examine your current operating costs in detail as well. Any outstanding inefficiencies can easily be leveraged as yet another reason to consider investing in AP automation.  

If your organization still utilizes traditional, paper methods for your AP processes, lay out the current spend on tasks like: 

• The monthly cost of processing, printing, and shipping paper documents. 

• How much your business is paying for printing duplicated invoices. 

• The cost of generating new documents when originals are misplaced or damaged. 

• The cost in staff time to manually enter data into your ERP. 

While it may be painful to create a clear picture of wasted time and money, it can help you sell the remedy, AP automation, to your financial decision-makers.  

A leading AP automation solution can digitize, capture, and validate, eliminating paper-based errors or loss. By shifting to fully digital document management and storage, you’ll also eliminate your printing costs. Additionally, keeping an accurate, up-to-date record of invoice activity throughout the invoice-to-pay process will help your AP team track approvals and rectify any potential bottlenecks.  

Set ROI Expectations 

One of the biggest—and perhaps most impactful—questions around investing in a new software like AP automation is the matter of ROI. How long will it take for an AP automation solution to return enough cost savings to cover its costs? 

You’ll want to provide your finance leaders with a clear, reasonable timetable that gives them accurate expectations regarding the ROI of AP automation. It’s important to note that on average, investing in such a solution generates ROI well within the first year of implementation. 

Make Your Pitch 

Adopting AP automation is a transformative upgrade that organizations can’t afford to delay in today’s digital business landscape. AP automation can deliver significant cost savings, drive employee efficiency, and quickly turn your AP department into a revenue powerhouse.  

If you’re ready to make your pitch, download DocuPhase’s free template to build a successful business case for AP automation.  

If the benefits of AP automation sound like something that could benefit your business, schedule a demo with one of our automation experts today!