The Intuit community is well-known for the diversity of its customers. Companies and business owners of nearly every size and industry rely on QuickBooks products to manage their finances and help them grow. Intuit itself invests a lot of resources into helping their customers succeed and grow.
Avoid Growing Pains in Accounts Payable
Growth does not come without challenges. Accounts Payable is one area of finance where the burden of a fast growing company can be keenly felt. If the Accounts Payable team is overworked and performing inefficiently, it can result in late payments, disgruntled vendors, and valuable time wasted by many employees at the company. Finance leadership needs to take an active role in scaling their bandwidth to ensure that business growth is sustained with efficient back office processes.
Proper planning to scale your Accounts Payable process can help:
- Ensure all invoices are paid only once the terms of service are verified and met.
- Provide finance leadership with accurate cash flow forecasting and KPIs.
- Strengthen relationships between Accounts Payable, employees in other departments, and vendors.
Conventional thought points to manual invoice processing as the “weak link” in AP, easily solved with automation. But the real pain point of AP lies with inefficient approvals management. The entire approvals process is bogged down by a lack of flexible, natural communication. It’s easy to think this might be AP’s fault, but it is not. Between email threads, phone calls, and literally chasing down people for approvals to meet a deadline, communication is actually an incredibly important skill for AP. They just need a better way to do it. If you can solve this problem, you are one step closer to “fixing” AP.
How to Scale Accounts Payable with Ease
There are generally three options for Accounts Payable departments looking to scale productivity; optimizing resources, outsourcing, or hiring. While each option has their pros and cons, a fast-growing business may not have the time or cash to outsource AP or hire more staff. If you can help your current AP team collaborate more efficiently with everyone involved in the approvals process, you may discover its untapped potential.
If you’re a busy QuickBooks user facing the challenge of scaling AP, find a business solution that checks the following boxes:
- Solves the communication breakdown in AP by making the approvals process a collaborative, not automated, experience.
- Helps connect everyone involved in the approvals process, not just AP and approvers.
- Fast and easy to implement and learn.
- Reduces the time spent manually keying data (check out new advances in A.I. & machine learning for AP).
If you’re in a position of trying to figure out how to scale AP, take a step back and look at your current process end-to-end to see what factors are preventing AP from working at max efficiency. Address these issues first to lay the groundwork for a scalable AP process that can handle continued business growth.
Theresa Condon is the Marketing Director at Stampli, an Accounts Payable solution that helps get invoices approved 5X faster with A.I. Set up with QuickBooks in just 1 hour. She has worked in the Bay Area tech industry for the past decade, and is thrilled to work on the Stampli team! When she isn’t exercising her word-nerd side, she’s out on the trails enjoying the California sunshine.