Accounts Payable Automation: How to Reduce Your Financial Admin By 70%

The finance department is the secret weapon in any successful construction business. It keeps the bills paid, manages cash flow and ensures projects stay on budget.

But as your business grows, it is not uncommon for your finance team to become slowed down by manual processes. Just check out some of these stats:

• 97% of finance teams waste time chasing down invoice details every month.
• 47% of supplier invoices are paid late due to slow processing— great for your cash flow, but not your reputation.
• 33% of finance teams spend between 50% to 75% of their time collecting, entering and validating financial data.

Processing fewer invoices? Hiring more staff? In fact, it is automating most of the accounts payable process. With AP automation, you can simplify the procure-to-pay process and allow your team to refocus on what matters. 

Let us show you how it works.

What is accounts payable automation?

From purchase orders to supplier invoices to approvals and accounting, many construction businesses are still doing these accounts payable processes manually on paper or spreadsheets.

However, accounts payable automation essentially means using software to streamline and automate these manual processes for you.

It doesn’t eliminate the need for your finance team but simply empowers them to work more efficiently. It removes time-consuming tasks while also giving you greater visibility and control of your financial data.

How AP automation reduces admin by 70%

Accounts payable automation is a powerful and clever piece of software. Our customers typically report saving 70% of their financial workload. Other customers have said it saves them 20 hours a week.

Here’s how AP automation creates more efficiency in your business:

1. It increases visibility.

With traditional accounts payable methods, you often have no visibility of project spending until after it has occurred. Which makes it difficult to manage budgets, process progress claims and complete the month-end close. 

But with accounts payable automation, you always have visibility of accurate and up-to-date financial information by logging onto a single platform.

For administrators, this means you know exactly which accounts payable invoices need to be processed simply by looking at your screen. Your dashboard shows you exactly how many invoices are awaiting approval and which approver they’re sitting with. 

So, no more flicking through filing cabinets or chasing email trails to find invoices.

For quantity surveyors and project managers, AP automation makes it easy to manage your costs and stay on budget. 

As all your accounts payable data is in one place and accurately assigned to cost codes, you’ll always have an up-to-date total of project spend. With automated purchase orders, you’ll even have visibility of your committed costs before all the project invoices have come in.

For business owners and CFOs, AP automation helps improve your profit margins by reducing costs.

As the accounts payable process becomes digital and streamlined, there’s a significant reduction in manual errors, rework and overall time wasted. With greater efficiency, you can complete projects more quickly and with fewer resources.

2. It saves invoice processing time.

The average business takes 30 days to complete a supplier invoice payment, which means 47% of invoices are paid late. That’s not necessarily bad for your business, but how do you want to be perceived?

For businesses with accounts payable automation, the average invoice processing time is only 5 days, which creates a much better look with suppliers. 

So, where do those time savings come from?

• You eliminate data entry: With AP automation, approved invoices are automatically entered into your accounting software for payment. This means there’s no need to manually enter the invoice data or check for errors, which can save your team hours each week.
• You stop chasing approvers: The traditional invoice approval process involves a lot of back and forth between approvers and the finance team. But with AP automation, invoices are automatically delegated to the correct approvers. They’ll receive a notification and can complete their approval with one click, which speeds up the process and reduces the need for manual follow-ups.

This streamlined procure-to-pay process means huge time savings that will help you improve your cash flow management, build better relationships with suppliers and negotiate better pricing terms. 

In conclusion 

When you begin to understand it, accounts payable automation is actually a simple and straightforward concept. It takes the time-consuming manual processes of traditional accounts payable and streamlines it all into one digital platform.

With AP automation software, you can save up to 70% of your admin time and redirect your focus to what really matters in your business. It’s like having a magic wand that simplifies your financial processes, saves you time and helps you achieve better profitability.

Simplify your accounts payable process

At Lentune, we help construction companies streamline the way they handle project finances. Our project cost management and automation tools help you to save money, improve cash flow and increase productivity. We’d love to show you how it works!

In a live demo, we can answer any questions and show you how Lentune could grow your business.

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Looking to learn more about Invoice Automation and discover how it can transform your accounts payable? No worries, we wrote "The Ultimate Guide to Invoice Automation for Construction". It's packed with valuable insights that will show you why it's an effective solution for your business.