Name: From Manual to Modern: How Benchmarking AP Transforms Business Operations
Uploaded: 2025-02-18T18:46:08.539Z
Duration: 32 min 32 s
Description: From Manual to Modern: How Benchmarking AP Transforms Business Operations

Transcript for "From Manual to Modern: How Benchmarking AP Transforms Business Operations": Hello, everyone. We are going to get started very, very soon. But while we are waiting for a few more people to trickle in, just wanted to remind you that Imbursed in Motion is coming back this year. It is November in Nashville. If you are interested in registering, you can go to the document section on the right hand side in the engagement area, and there is a link to the registration. And I'll talk a little bit more about that ever so shortly. So let's see. Let's take a look. Yeah. Let's get started. We have a good number of people here. Hello, everyone. So glad you could join this webinar from manual to modern, how benchmarking AP transforms business operations. I'm Lauren Boyd, your customer marketing manager here at Imbursed, and I'll be hosting today. Just a few housekeeping things before we get started. This webinar is being recorded, and you'll receive the recording afterwards. The engagement area on the right that I mentioned a little bit earlier, you can download documents over there. We have several case studies. We have, a report and other things that you'd be interested in and including also the Imperson Motion registration link. We will also have a poll during the session, so when it's time for the poll, it will pop up on the screen, but you can also respond to the poll in the poll section in the engagement area that will show up when the poll is live. If you have questions, go to the q and a tab to submit your questions. And then lastly, if you would like to schedule a call with sales team, at the top, you can click the request a follow-up button, and someone from sales will reach out to you. Just a quick look at today's agenda. We have lots of topics to cover as you can see. So just wanted to make sure y'all have an idea of what's going on, and I will now actually shoot over to our presenters today. So over to you, Jeremy. Excellent. Thanks for that. So, hello, everyone. We're gonna go through a couple of slides and conversation topics around AP. I'm Jeremy So to, VP of our global, solutions consulting. So I manage a team of solutions consultants and also, RFP response team, and we get involved with customers that are looking to expand or maybe initiate these types of processes. I've been here, at Imbursed for a little over ten years working with the products, that we offer, and happy to be with you today. I'll turn over to Mike next. Hi. Good good afternoon, everyone, or good morning, everyone, depending on where you're sitting. My name is Mike McKay. I'm part of the Imbursed team as well. My background is probably twenty plus years of ADP automation, really from a best practice standpoint. I've also built and deployed payment solutions all over the globe. So I'm kind of excited to talk about this a little bit today. It's been my, basically, my entire career through my entire life. So I really just wanna start, really kinda just laying a benchmark in where I see most organizations spending or or how they spend their money. So graphically here, you know, typically, what Jeremy and I see across most organizations is that 10% of an organization's spend is wrapped up in a a t and e process. Right? So travel and employee expenses. You know, it's not the largest area of your spend, but, typically, what we see is it impacts the most individuals of the company. Another area of spend, is you know, another smaller area of spend is about 15% of spend is wrapped up in a credit card process, meaning walking plastic. Right? So this is this is it's walking around in somebody's pocket. It's locked in a drawer, and we're seeing that type of spend, going out through this credit card process. Again, not the largest area of spend, but what I would say is it's an area of spend that can be the most scary in the fact that you don't know what your employees are spending money on until the end of the month when that statement rolls in. Obviously, we have some miscellaneous, type of spend as well. This is wrapped around in you know, I would consider miscellaneous, like, rent, utilities. Obviously, this is too pretty tightly managed, and it's usually, pretty succinct over month over month. But the largest area of the spend that we're gonna talk about today really is wrapped around AP spend. Right? This is typically, in every organization, the largest amount of spend. The other area the other thing that I kinda wanna just level set with on is we typically see organizations at a different stage of automation. And I've tried to break it down simply here so we can kinda get it all in, on one slide. But typically what we see is that there's probably about most organizations, about 10% of organizations, this is typically at the larger enterprise, state, has automated their AP, and they've done a really good job. They've embraced technology. They use the technology, and they use it to their advantage to really fully automate their AP process. The next area is this concept of semi automated, and this is a little bit gray. This is an area that is really kind of in the eye of the holder. Some organizations feel that, well, we get 90% of our invoices in via email, thus, we're automated. Now I might not look at that as automated. You might not look at it as automated, but some organizations do. They also you know, they might use Outlook to route any, invoices around. Right? They view that as automated. Again, I wouldn't use it automated, but they do. So it's kind of a little bit, like I said, an eye in the beholder. The last area is manual. Right? And this is an area that they're still pushing around a lot of paper. They are, you know, pulling it in via paper, via mail, via snail mail. They might even be getting it in email wise, but then they're printing it and and floating it out, in paper, to their different departments to get it approved. And you can see that this is a very, very large, group of folks. Right? I think the the common thing here is that all companies spend money. It doesn't matter if you're the smallest company or the largest, if you're a multinational global organization or you're a nonprofit. All companies spend money, and what we're seeing now is AP viewed as a strategic partner in managing this spend. Right? And it it gives them the ability to obviously automate this spend, but it's really important to view the data. It's used in cash management. So AP has really become a strategic partnership across in most organizations. So I guess we have a poll question here coming up. What, and I'd love to kinda get, some ideas from you folks. What are some of the most difficult areas or challenges that your AP program is is, running into now? We've got some, out there, but let's just kinda see what this looks like. And I'll give you a few minutes, to take a look at it. Lauren, you'll tell me when, we should probably move on if you would, please. Yes. I will. So, yeah, we have a few people already starting to fill it out, but, yeah, go ahead and get your votes and let your voice be heard. We will also, please take note that if it's more than one challenge, you can select more than one. It does not just have to be one challenge. I'll leave it open another let's do ten, fifteen more seconds. But already, we're starting to see high percentage of exceptions, approvals taking too long, lack of visibility is pretty good split, staffing issues. Yeah. I think we can close it here. Perfect. And then I seem to have lost my buttons, Lauren. What did I do wrong? You did not do anything wrong. We just have the poll going, so I will Okay. Slide. Thank you so much. You're always my savior. I couldn't I couldn't do these without your help. I think appreciate you so much. So so, yeah, I really didn't get to see the the the results, but, I think it's it's important to to understand that, you know, obviously, that's a little bit of a leading question. Right? Because I read a number of different studies, and so I've already had kind of, what I'm looking at as some of the largest challenges. And I think the point here is that it doesn't matter if you're highly automated, if you're semiautomated, or you're manual. Some of these challenges stretch across all organizations. Right? The number one challenge that most organizations identify is this concept of high exceptions. Right? It's the exception processing of a particular invoice. Again, it could be a manual invoice. It could be highly automated. But this is typically the area of most concern to a lot of organizations, and it be it's because this exception process can really slow the process down to a crawl, and in some organization, it brings it to a full stop. Right? And so nothing can happen until this exception is is relieved. Right? It also leads into the next area of long approval. Right? A long approved cycle approval cycles really impact of normal, organizations. One, because most organizations are trying to to make it more efficient and squeeze that cycle time down. And there's a number of reasons why, but probably one of the biggest reasons is is they wanna get it through the process. They don't want it to hang out in the platform just waiting for approval. The other area is you need to start thinking about is discounts. Right? How can you go to your suppliers or your vendors and suppliers to ask for a discount if your approvals are taking twenty some odd days or seventeen days or past thirty days. Right? Staffing issues. Staffing issues is one that has been around forever. Right? And it's I think it's become more highlighted maybe a little bit after the pandemic, but definitely, is on the rise. I look at it a little bit differently. I look at it as as look. We all know that recent college graduates all wanna start at the CEO level. Right? They wanna be in charge immediately, and we all know that that's just not a reality. But what we do see is college graduates and people that are entering the workforce wanna be used strategically. Right? Data entry is important. I never wanna take that away. But it's not a strategic use, and many times, younger employees or early college graduates are going to look for a role where they can use their skills and become more strategic than just another employee in the organization. So staffing issues, I think, is another area that just continues on. And then we're also seeing in the post pandemic is that invoice counts are on the rise. Most organizations have grown probably around 20% in invoice count in just the last few years. And if staffing shortages continue, that that makes it very, very difficult. Right? Fraud. Fraud is another area where we've recently seen some more activity. And what I mean by that is fraud used to be really downstream. It was almost at the payment level. We'd see organizations fishing for account numbers and routing codes, trying to get AP teams to change those numbers, or they'd lift images off checks or change check amounts or the beneficiary on the check. We're starting to see fraud slide forward in the process, getting the ability to set up a bogus vendor, submitting bogus invoices against that vendor. Now some of this fraud is internal. I don't wanna discount that, but much of this fraud happens externally as well. Getting someone to do something that they don't suspect is fraud, like I said, setting up a bogus vendor, invoicing against that bogus vendor. So fraud is really starting to become, more and more prevalent and moving farther up the chain. But I think one of the biggest things that I think is important or challenges is lack of visibility. And that visibility could be from anything from I can't manage a process I can't see, meaning that Bob has an invoice stuck on his desk, and I can't see it. It could be that an invoice shows up on the controller's desk at the end of the month and needs to be paid. It could be that we can't see where the bottleneck is in our process. So visibility is really, really, getting, you know, high high levels. So here's some things that I think are important, and we're gonna talk a little bit more about them. I'm not gonna stay on this slide long, but we'll make sure that that that it's up here long enough. Obviously, these are all key components that most organizations are trying to measure and qualify. Right? The cost of an invoice, the cycle time of an invoice, how much is going straight through, How what's the exceptions look like? These are all extremely important things to measure. And a lot of times, what we see is that if you are not having using technology to measure these, it's almost impossible. I would tell you what I believe when I look at this slide. I tried to dig into it a little bit more. Best in class in my mind is those organizations that, again, have adopted technology, and they're using tech that technology to really drive efficiency, and they're able to measure these. The all others, I think, is a mix between manual and semiautomated because some of the reports that I see just in cost alone, right, an automated invoice is $3. That makes a lot of sense to me. But for the all others, around $13, that might be right for a semiautted organization. But I would say that it's probably even higher with, manual. Same with in the idea of the cycle time. So I wanna make sure I keep moving on here. Just a couple of things, and then I'm gonna turn this over to Jeremy. But there's key things that are changing the landscape of AP, and I'm just gonna go go through them very quick quickly. AI. AI is truly becoming a game changer within most organizations. It starts with transcription, and what I mean by that is taking the data from a paper or an emailed invoice and making sure that it populates correctly into the platform. The key here is is that we've all had tools in the past that has done an okay job, but now AI is increasing the accuracy, and it's really a bend it's really the foundation because just think what can happen next. It's that self coding. It is the, approval workflow. Many of this stuff can happen in the AI environment because you have confidence in the data transcription. Next is purchase orders. Purchase orders have been around forever. The purchase orders aren't always the best for all types of spend. We saw a phase probably fifteen years ago where everything was gonna be on a purchase order. It's all gonna be managed spend. And what we saw was organizations would either create the purchase order after the fact, after the invoice, so they were a % compliant, or what we also saw was rogue spend, somebody begging forgiveness instead of asking permission, using that credit card to buy the widget that they need because they didn't wanna go through the approval process. So POs can be important, but you need to use it for the right spend. Punch outs. Punch outs has been typically something that's been at the highest level of organizations, meaning that they focused on the procurement side of organizations. We're starting to see that come down. We're seeing smaller organizations using punchouts to a catalog to help control spend and making sure that they're getting the right discounts. And I'm gonna move down to the last one because I wanna turn this over to, Jeremy, and that is analytics. Analytics is changing the game in AP. I would say around five years ago, we saw a big change. We saw that data was driving decisions. Data became one of the top reasons why companies wanted to automate AP. But what we've seen probably in the last two years is that analytics driving that data, not just screens and screens and screens of data, but using dashboards to highlight different areas of spend is changing the landscape. And I think data is really becoming and, again, actionable data is really becoming a key transforming process in AP. So So with that, Jeremy, I'm gonna turn it over to you. I know I used up a lot of your time, but, over to you. Super. Thanks for that, Mike. Really good, introduction and background on the AP processes. I'm gonna dig a little bit into the visibility and compliance trends focusing on those analytics, capabilities, and, metrics that will be useful to you. In the poll, there were the top two that we saw. One was related to exceptions, and the other one was related to processing time. And what I think is great about those two specifically is that they tend to lend themselves well to those kinds of dashboards that I'm gonna show you to you today. The high number of exceptions. Well, what is a high number? Right now you can quantify. You can actually get specific around which exceptions are coming through, not just generically an exception. And then you can, start to define what do you consider to be high and how do you reduce that. Right? What tools maybe with the PO capabilities or the punch out capabilities that Mike mentioned a second ago, could you leverage to reduce the exceptions that you're getting? When it comes to too long, what does too long mean? Right? I think everybody might have a different opinion. And depending on maybe the vendor or the, amount or the people impacted, all those can have an opinion on on what is too long. So, with our systems, you'll be able to go in and take a look at what exactly is happening today, and then you can decide, hey. What's too long? So with that in mind, let's go into the first dashboard, around kinda invoice processing. This is a great compliance dashboard. It's showing you a couple of different styles of analytics. It's showing you KPI metrics, so kind of the numbers on the left hand side. It's showing you, that pie chart that's allowing you to understand relative, changes or differences between some of that, spend. And then, also, you're seeing these bar charts with trend lines that are allowing you to very easily compare a month over month trend behavior. So there are a lot of different things that this chart is showing. I'm gonna dig into it a little bit here just to kinda see what, what it is we're able to present to you. Right? So there's a lot of when we talk about header compliance, this potentially means that the system is doing your work for you. Right? A compliance might be something that was having to be done manually, right, with maybe an AP professional or somebody in the approval mix that's actually catching these compliance issues. Compliance issues are now being caught by the system, and it's allowing you to kinda speed up the process but also be more accurate. Right? When we talk about header compliance, it could be things that, hey. Maybe we're buying from a vendor that we shouldn't be buying from, prices that don't match or conform. You can drill into it more specifically, and you're gonna find a whole lot of duplicate invoices. Duplicate invoices tends to be the highest, instance of compliance issues across our customers, which is obviously a very good exception to be catching. Right? But some other examples might be old invoices. Right? Something that is maybe sixty days old and just popped into the system. Right? Things of that nature. That is a compliance, but it is in a a bad compliance. It's really just highlighting that, hey. We've got something that is not normal, and we need to pay attention to it. But the system is highlighting it for you and helping you, work through that. Right? And then finally, you can take all this and go another level and actually start stank ranking, maybe employees with, instances of these warnings. Right? So you kinda start understand, hey. Do I have specific people or processes, business units that lend themselves to more of these exceptions? And now you know not just how much, the exceptions are occurring or how often they occur. You know which exceptions occur and you know where they're occurring, and you can kinda take actions from there. The next one here I'm gonna show you is upon the approval side. So that was that that second, poll item that came up. Hey. The approvals are taking too long. Once again, what is too long? Well, now you can start to understand what is your average, and then you can kinda break that down into different sections here. Right? So, by taking a look at this, analytics dashboard, there's a lot of great, KPIs at the top, but also some, great information here, in the below sections. So for example, you can see that, in this instance, everything's being processed within thirty days, right, which is excellent. And then you're also able to see, well, within that thirty days, what are my time frames? And I think one of the coolest kind of, metrics within this dashboard is that you're able to see the difference between an invoice date and inception. Right? So going back to kind of our OCR intake process, if an invoice was issued on day x, like, how long did it take to get into the system? You can now capture that. Right? That's, not usually time that you would include in your approval metrics, but it's certainly time that your vendors might, consider part of their, payment metrics. Right? How long does it take you to pay? Well, if you don't see it for, seven days, then, you know, certainly, you should don't feel like you should be penalized for it, but the the vendors typically don't care. Right? It's like, they wanted to pay it on time regardless. Right? Another, interesting thing here is that rush metric on the right hand side, not everybody would necessarily consider rush invoices, but, you can kinda measure, hey. How quickly are you addressing rush invoices? And then the only one thing I would add to the whole rush invoice idea is, you if we know scams and things of that nature, one of the tactics they use is making it a rush. Right? Kinda putting you under pressure to hurry up and make a payment on something. So, it's one of those paradoxes where when you get a rush invoice that seem to be paid quickly, those are probably invoices that you wanna also wanna pay special attention to. Right? So how do you balance that out and and take a look? Right? Alright. Very good. So, the next one here, about understanding cycle times, just digging in a little bit more, you're able to kinda see the the rush versus non rush efficiency in a little more detail here. You can kinda see another example of time frames around invoice cycle times and how long they take at each stage of the process. Alright. Moving along, I I've got another example here of digging into specific compliant rules. And then you can expand the dashboard. Right? Because it's not just a matter of how often, the counts are. You also wanna know it by spend, and then you wanna break that down even further and potentially understand by vendor and other kinds of, breakdown as to what would be useful across these invoice items. Right? So, how how do we differentiate and improve the efficiencies? Like, once you're starting to get all this stuff, what are the the tools available to you to be able to make changes to this? And, we had talked about a little earlier. Mike had mentioned that there's the invoice processing capabilities potentially with the AI enhancements allowing to do increased data capture. There's also the PO capabilities, being able to get some approvals and coding upfront and let the system do more for you. There's those punch out catalogs that can tie into this as well. So once you start to understand where your compliance issues sit, where your approval metrics are kind of expanded, you can start to put in processes and changes to help with that. So this next slide is digging into a little bit about, some of the details of the AP approval metrics. And what I wanna highlight here is that one of the actions you might take is to actually take a look at the individuals that are in the approval workflow. And you might decide that you want to potentially put over a process of BPO process in place, business processing outsourcing, model in. So that it's not just your own team. Potentially, you have external, approvers in the mix. And you're able to do that because we've got all the KPIs in place. You're gonna be able to monitor the amount of time that it takes for an invoice to be approved. You'll be able to see at which stage and specific individuals are taking actions on these and taking maybe longer amounts of time, and you'll be able to break it up by department. You'll be able to use the rules in the system also to funnel things, to different levels of priority like we showed earlier with the rush model. So when you start looking at a preapproval metrics, this one is a generic dashboard. But what you'll be able to do is potentially slice and dice this with filter to say, hey. What are my metrics around those rush invoices? What about invoices that are over $10,000? Right? Invoices that are over a thousand dollars. You can start breaking those things down to really dig into your process and make sure that you don't have any gaps in the whole mix. The other piece just from a process perspective that I wanna highlight is have common and similar dashboards across your processes. So in this case, you we've got a PO customer. And the benefit here is that you've got staff that's looking at maybe your invoice approval metrics. When you go to the PO approval metrics, well, you're still getting the same numbers, right, rather than the same KPIs, but they're in the same place even so that you don't have to kinda relearn things and and make mistakes. Right? It's always the same buttons in the same place, and you're able to kinda very easily absorb the information that's being presented to you, on these charts. Right? One of the interesting things about the PO capability is that when you move some of the approvals and the coding to the front end of the purchasing process through a purchase order. You can use the OCR then to auto code these invoices when they come in, and you can add additional compliance checks in the invoice piece. So for example, if you have a PO that's been approved for a thousand dollars and there's you're gonna buy three, widgets and and four what's we call it. Alright? Well, when those widgets and what's we call it come in, what you'll be able to do is say, hey. I agreed to this price and this quantity, and our OCR is gonna leverage all the data on the invoice, gonna match it up against the data on the PO, and it's gonna find all of the discrepancies for you, within the tool. Right? Talking about that technology, you can also measure how effective the technology is being. So you can see the percentage of invoices that are being coded through OCR. You can compare that against the total number of invoices that are, being created, manually. You can kinda also determine where these invoices coming from. All of that allows you to kinda understand, hey. Are we leveraging the OCR and the technology in the right way? You can start to measure what are my PO versus non PO invoices as well. Nice extras, tips and tricks. Be sure to leverage all of your products because there's I wouldn't call it leakage, but like Mike mentioned earlier, there's some of the spend that's coming in on a credit card. Some of it is reimbursable to an employee. Those are expense reports. Right? You can have other stuff that's coming in on an invoice. And you probably have spend that's on an invoice that could be an expense report, and it's on an expense report and should be an invoice. Marketing events, the meetings and and and events that might require deposits and venues and things of that nature, large spend. We see, you know, Google AdWords and those types of subscriptions. All of that, is now visible through the system here. Right? So wrapping up, for our webinar today, we've got a a nice quote from one of our customers at Slalom talking about how the first solution save us time so they can focus on what really matters. Right? Transforming their clients' businesses. And, happy to chat with you all more, after the webinar, and, thanks for joining us. We actually have a little time for that last quest or the last, comment. There we go. Oops. Sorry. I went too far. Key outcomes, if you wanna take that, Mike. Yeah. So I actually, I you know, everyone can kinda read that slide. But, you know, I wanna, first of all, thank you, Lauren, for for putting this on. Jeremy, very interesting some of the things that you talked about. I I can't agree more that data is really trans transforming AP, and so I'm excited about that. So I I really wanna thank everyone for attending today, and please reach out, and we can answer any questions after the webinar, and or, we can, get on the line and have a quick conversation. So thanks so much. Just like he said. Oh, well, we do have one quick oh, now we have all sorts of questions coming in. Okay. If y'all have a couple more seconds, let me just I'll share on screen. Pro or basic reporting? So I'm guessing that's about analytics pro in general. It it is. So depending on the product, pro is included. Now there are a few extra things here that that are available through our, inside advisor service as well. Right? So, maybe, and I'd I'm sorry. I missed where that comment came from. We can have a conversation with your account manager, make sure you're on the correct product. It might already be something that you're using. And then, any capabilities beyond that, potentially, our insight adviser team can support. Yeah. I think, that's really the only question. But if you do have any more questions, just feel free to throw them in the q and a. But thank you once again, everyone, for your questions today. We are already over time, so we will follow-up with any other questions that come on. And, we'll send out the recording within twenty four hours. And once again, you can go to the docs tab and download any additional information you would like. So thank you again, everyone. Thanks, Mike. Thanks, Jeremy. Have a great day. See y'all next time.