For the third consecutive time, Coupa is positioned in the Leaders Category in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Accounts Payable Automation Software 2024 Vendor Assessment for Midmarket and Large Enterprise. IDC positioned Coupa as a Leader in the AP market for its standout capabilities and strategies, highlighting Coupa’s community-generated AI and Compliance-as-a-Service. Download the Midmarket excerpt here.
The importance of accounts payable automation
Establishing a highly efficient and productive Accounts Payable (AP) department is critical to navigating today’s business environment because AP has a direct impact on the organization’s bottom line and productivity. As organizations grow in size, managing manual invoicing and payment processes become burdensome on existing resources, and financial processes become more complex and prone to error. This increases the workload of the AP team who become bogged down in manual tasks, further intensifying the lack of visibility and control across the organization. In many ways, this lack of visibility into spending leaves organizations navigating the day-to-day blindly.
Nearly one in two (46%) finance leaders say they lack full visibility into financial data across their company. As a result, 43% say they’re unable to make informed decisions due to data challenges.
With regular business disruptions and market volatility the new norm, slow error-prone processes with limited visibility no longer cut it. Instead, finance leaders are moving beyond a mere system of record for financial transactions and turning to advanced AP automation software, to protect and grow margins and ensure scalable operational excellence.
Coupa’s AP automation software helps organizations multiply margins
Reddit, a popular community platform, struggled with low visibility into POs, invoices, and vendors, preventing the organization from preparing for an IPO. Pulling data from multiple systems made budget and forecast planning nearly impossible while long-term decision-making became increasingly difficult. The company’s finance team was further bogged down by a manual accrual process that resulted in closing taking 15 days. With Coupa, Reddit now has complete visibility into POs, invoices, and vendors at a line item level, equipping the company to make more informed timely decisions. After Coupa, Reddit cut closing time to six days or less — a 60% reduction — and was able to successfully IPO due to streamlined auditing processes and out-of-the-box compliance. Coupa became a margin multiplier for Reddit, enabling the company to reach $6 million in total savings within just three quarters.
How Coupa improves the bottom line and creates operational efficiency
Coupa’s AP automation software provides comprehensive real-time visibility into all of the money flowing in and out of your organization so you can streamline accruals, optimize cash flow, and gain control over spend.
By streamlining, integrating, and automating processes across procurement and AP, finance teams can increase productivity, reduce manual errors and fraud, such as duplicate invoices, and power operational efficiency. This enables teams to improve cost-savings, optimize their days payable outstanding (DPO), and maximize rebates and working capital. Coupa makes margins multiply by:
- Doing more with less: Gain automated multi-level invoice validation, built-in approval workflows, and reminders to reduce errors, remove bottlenecks, reduce cost-per-invoice, and save time. Top performing Coupa customers achieve an average first-time match rate of 97% and average invoice approval cycle time of 10.6 business hours. With Coupa’s centralized payment hub, payments for AP, treasury, payroll, or tax are all made from one place with automatic reconciliation back to the general ledger. Vendors also have access to an easy-to-use self-service portal, where they manage their own critical information and data, reducing fraud risk for you and your suppliers.
- Prioritizing compliance: With streamlined expenses, payments, and always up-to-date invoicing compliance, Coupa makes it easier for companies to comply with local and global standards. Coupa enables SOX compliance and streamlines audit readiness with audit trails, segregation of duties, controls, fraud and risk monitors, and financial reporting tools. Users have immediate support with out-of-the-box regulatory and tax compliance, such as e-invoicing mandates, for over 50 foreign government-mandated electronic invoicing networks and clearance models. Additional software, add-ons, or IT setup isn’t required.
- Leveraging the power of community-generated AI: Gaining a margin multiplier is possible when leveraging the compounding power of Coupa’s community-generated AI, the only AI trained on data from more than $6 trillion of real-time global transactional spend across a network of roughly 10 million buyers and suppliers for more than 15 years. With data from companies of all sizes, in every industry, and across the world, Coupa’s community-generated AI allows organizations to benchmark against similar companies, driving real margin impact through predictive insights, prescriptive decisions, and automated actions capabilities. Coupa AI also provides enhanced fraud detection, supplier performance rating, and much more.
Multiplying margins with Coupa’s Total Spend Management platform
In addition to noting Coupa’s advanced AP automation capabilities — from automated invoicing to digital payments, expense management, travel and expense reimbursement, compliance, and increased fraud prevention — IDC Marketscape highlights Coupa AI and Compliance-as-a-Service as standout strengths.
Coupa’s holistic Total Spend Management platform enables these solutions to work in sync, unlocks their full value, optimizes operational excellence, and scales with a business as it grows. By connecting procurement to payment processes on one platform, companies gain better visibility and control over their spending while also making more informed, cost-effective decisions.
