AP Automation: Stop Processing Paper, Start Controlling Your Payments Today

The invoice-to-pay-to-reconciliation accounts payable process is essential for your business — but it takes a tremendous amount of time to get right.

Accounts payable (AP) is an important part of any business, as their mission is to manage those accounts being paid (otherwise known as the money flowing into and out of the business). The efficiency of this department therefore relates directly to not only your organization’s financial stability, but its very reputation as well. How quickly you get paid — and how quickly you pay vendors — matters a great deal more than most people realize.

As you’re able to build trust with your AP department, you’re able to forge better relationships with those entities (meaning customers and vendors) that make your business a success in the first place. This leads to better deals and better opportunities, and helps create a competitive advantage moving forward.

This process becomes exponentially more difficult as your company grows and evolves. The more invoices and financial transactions you're dealing with, the longer it takes to manage your complex AP processes. This takes your attention away from more important matters that actually propel your business forward.

Wouldn't it be ideal if you could not only reduce the manual work required of your employees, but also the instances of human error that come with it? Isn't an opportunity to free up your accounting department’s time to focus on tasks that truly matter — like managing payables and optimizing working capital — worth taking?

Welcome to AP automation from Coupa. 

Embracing the benefits of AP automation

Coupa's AP automation solution is an innovative, unified procure-to-pay process that: 

• Entirely automates two- and three-way invoice matching
• Eliminates manual reconciliations and paper invoices
• Streamlines tasks with touchless processes
• Helps reduce fraud and keep you compliant

Coupa's industry-leading solution offers multilevel automated invoice validation, dynamic approval workflows, full mobile access, and more. With AP automation and faster invoice processing, your accounts payable employees can leverage early payment discounts to strengthen invaluable customer relationships and maximize days payable outstanding in an effort to optimize cash flow.

This also creates an invaluable opportunity to automate time-consuming expense report reconciliations, all so that AP employees can devote their attention to more strategic work. Thanks to Coupa’s easy-to-use platform, pre-approved and post-approved spend information is finally unified in a way that’s easy for everyone in the business to understand. That means finance teams have the total visibility they need to both control and guarantee global compliance, reduce spend leakages, and more.

Plus, working capital management is made far easier with comprehensive treasury management capabilities. Coupa’s solution lets you uncover data trends and patterns that likely would have gone undiscovered, putting you in a position to make better and more informed choices moving forward.

Unlock the power of AP automation today

Coupa's AP automation solution offers a number of powerful benefits, letting you: 

• Automate up to 80% of your AP team’s workload, allowing them to focus on revenue-drivers
• Use artificial intelligence (AI) and optical character recognition (OCR) to automatically (and more accurately) process invoices
• Put your business in a position to scale rapidly, all without the burden of adding additional staff members
• Reduce payables operation friction, all while allowing you to grow your AP department in a comfortable and cost-effective way
• Accelerate your financial close dramatically by bringing comprehensive transaction and reconciliation reports into your enterprise resource planning (ERP) system
• Create purchase order processes that finally match the way your AP team likes to work, rather than forcing them to change their workflows to make up for the limitations of your software
• Virtually eliminate financial and compliance risk by creating KPRM-approved (and fully W-9/W-8 tax compliant) audit trails and approval workflows

You can see everything both before and after expenses are incurred, letting you better control costs and reduce spend leakages whenever opportunities exist. You can also uncover new insights for greater savings and efficiency, allowing you to channel that money back into your business in those areas where it’s needed most.

Coupa’s AP automation solution is designed to drive value beyond basic expense processing, helping you identify savings, guarantee end-to-end control, and continue to grow and evolve as your business does the same. All this, and you get a straightforward and effortless setup process that allows you to keep your existing processes and systems exactly where they are.

In the end, Coupa's solution isn't about replacing the way you currently do things at all. It's about supporting and empowering your employees so that they can in turn do the same for the business you've already worked so hard to build — which in and of itself is the most important benefit of all.