Accounts payable · Automation
Is accounts payable automation necessary?
Not for every business. Here is how to tell whether your invoice volume and line-item complexity have reached the point where it pays for itself.
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Necessary is a strong word for software. A business processing thirty simple invoices a month does not need accounts payable automation, and would not notice it if they had it. The honest question is where the threshold sits.
The four steps of accounts payable
However you do it, the process is the same four steps:
- Receive the invoice.
- Review it.
- Approve it.
- Pay the supplier.
Automation only touches the first two. It gets the document in and turns it into a coded transaction. Approval stays a decision, and payment stays in your accounting system. Any vendor promising to automate all four is describing something you should read carefully.
Three signs you are past the threshold
Your invoices have line items that matter
If your bills are single-line — a phone account, a subscription, a rent invoice — automation saves you a small amount of typing. If your bills carry twenty lines that need coding to different accounts, jobs or cost centres, the effort per bill is an order of magnitude higher and so is the saving.
The same suppliers appear every month
Recurring suppliers are what makes mapping worthwhile. A supplier you see once will need coding by hand either way. A supplier you see forty times a year needs coding once.
Errors are reaching your reports
If the same expense lands in three different accounts across a quarter, or a bill has been entered twice, that is not a discipline problem. It is what happens when a repetitive task is done by a person under time pressure.
What it does not fix
- A chart of accounts nobody agrees on. Automation will apply the confusion consistently.
- Suppliers who send invoices as photographs in the body of an email.
- An approval process where nobody actually approves anything.
If your volume is genuinely low, the free plan is a reasonable place to sit indefinitely — twenty documents a month, at no cost. See pricing.
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Stop retyping supplier bills
Start on the free plan, connect Xero or Reckon, and process your first bills today.