Successful Finance Directors, Business Owners and Managers need to:
- Make decisions based on reliable information.
- Know what bills to pay each month.
- Have staff who are aware of their responsibilities and are engaged.
- Manage the business’s reputation.
- To operate at the scale they need to put in place the systems, people and processes that help make this happen.
Overcoming barriers
A common challenge is effective delegation – adding Managers without slowing the processes.
In the realm of Accounts Payable, this often manifests itself as:
- Slow processing of supplier invoices as they flow through the chain of command.
- Misclassification of expenditures, reducing the reliability of data.
- A lack of ownership of the numbers, the perception that the responsibility for expense belongs to finance and not with those responsible for the department or project.
- Poor supplier relations.
Process set up and maintenance
Verify makes it easy to set up approval chains over department or project expenditure.
- Approvers can be set up using one click to add from a list of users.
- This can be done by department, project, or account level if necessary.
Verify speeds up the processing of invoices providing visibility and control to Approvers.
The Approver:
- Can be sure they are operating within their authority level.
- See the account coding.
- See an image of the invoice.
- Be sure all costs related to their area of responsibility are seen by them or their delegates.
Focus on value-added activities
The work of the Accounts Staff moves from being focused on data entry to review work and management of exceptions.
These primary accounting concerns are addressed:
- Completeness: are all invoices that are received processed?
- Accuracy: is data from the invoice recorded accurately?
- Classification and coding: are amounts properly coded?
- Visibility: is the status of an invoice visible throughout the process?
- Control: is each invoice properly approved?
- Audit trail: once processed, is there a record of who did what?
Building Trust
The effective operation of every business is dependent on a reliable supply chain which relies on reputation, essentially Trust.
Verify puts the business in a position to build Trust with its suppliers.
Supplier Invoices are processed quickly, enabling payments to be made on time.
Responses for information from the supplier can be provided reliably in real-time.
Conclusion
Software tools like Verify enable Business Owners and Finance Directors to effectively delegate the approval of expenditure to subordinates and ensure that supplier invoices are processed accurately, quickly and efficiently. The resulting efficiency, visibility and control helps build Trust in the organisation both internally and externally.
