Anyone who has spent time in corporate finance knows that the back office is rife with time-consuming manual tasks like data entry, error checking, and ad-hoc reporting. In fact, recent research shows that nearly half of practitioners feel repetitive work is a massive drain on the organization.
While Procurement and Accounts Payable work hard to facilitate and manage a business's relationship with its vendors and contractors, they face many mundane tasks, including invoice accruals, vendor interactions, and tax form collections.
With thousands of hours wasted on these tasks, vendor management is long overdue for an upgrade.
By leveraging the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning, and natural language processing (NLP), finance teams now recover the lost time and focus spent on these repetitive tasks, entering into a new era in Vendor Management automation.
Why Vendor Management Automation is Necessary
Vendor management is a complex operation that requires incredible attention to detail and oversight. Even a small mistake can derail the process and lead to stalled projects, poor relationships with vendors, and tax and compliance issues.
The business needs to be a well-oiled machine to maximize vendor and contractor relationships. The correspondence needs to be swift and effective. Data must be accurate. All forms are executed accurately. Vendor management issues are a significant hurdle for many organizations, from inaccurate invoices to payment status requests, accounting for 36 percent of back-office problems within an organization. Automation may be the next step to an effective strategy if your business is working with hundreds or even thousands of different vendors and contractors.
- Repetitive Task Execution: Teams are bombarded with correspondence from vendors and contractors that require responses. Alongside these interactions, they must review and extract data from complex unstructured data, monitor payments and approvals, and more.
- Tedious Vendor Onboarding: Tedious interactions with domestic and international vendors to collect data and tax information can drag the vendor onboarding process on far longer than necessary. This monotony can slow down projects, sour vendor and contractor relationships, and give your business a bad name.
- Slow Monthly Close: Tasks supporting the monthly close process, including gathering invoice accruals and payment estimates from internal and external stakeholders, can be arduous tasks that may take up most of a team member’s time.
The Benefits of Vendor Management Automation
Understanding the benefits of vendor management automation is key to making a final decision. Take the vendor onboarding process, for example. As mentioned, a slow vendor onboarding process can delay a project and harm the business’s relationship with the vendor.
Consider the other benefits of automation:
Reduce Time Spent on Repetitive Tasks
Teams are consistently fielding and replying to correspondence with vendors and contractors. They also manually record information from unstructured digital documents, reconcile accounts, and create records and reports.
However, with automation, AI-powered bots do these time and energy-draining tasks more efficiently. With automation, sending and receiving countless messages, tracking statuses on the procurement lifecycle, and running redundant customer reports becomes a thing of the past.
Decrease Human Error on Reports and Records
Unfortunately, no matter how rigorous your oversight strategy is, something can go amiss. Whether it’s an incorrect number on a tax form or a duplicate payment recorded on the ledger, these issues cause real headaches for your team.
These errors cause a ripple effect across the finance department. With automation, finance teams gain even more confidence in their already strong oversight strategy.
A New Era in Procurement & Accounts Payable: Intelligent Vendor Management
Automation can bring your procurement function into the 21st century. Auditoria SmartFlow Skills are designed to leverage the power of automation to enhance vendor management processes and tasks’ efficiency.
By taking advantage of machine learning algorithms, Auditoria SmartFlow Skills for Intelligent Vendor Management respond to approvals and payment inquiries, capture critical vendor and supplier data, and securely reconcile them with your ERP applications.
In short, Auditoria SmartFlow Skills for Intelligent Vendor Management are lightyears ahead of the competition, helping to power your financial back-office.
Our comprehensive solution has powerful real-life applications, allowing you to:
- Bolster Your Compliance Strategy: Collect IRS tax forms, stay up-to-date with filing status, obtain insurance certificates, and remain in compliance.
- Automate Accounts Payable Inquiry: Allow bots to handle payment inquiries via secure bi-directional correspondence. Reduce these distractions for your A/P team.
- Control Your Data: Extract data from unstructured documents to free your team up from scouring disorganized documents. Track all steps of the procurement lifecycle start-to-finish.
- Invoice Accruals Automation: Auditoria’s bots effortlessly capture accruals insights, prepare journal entries, reconcile them into your ERP system, and accelerate your monthly close while ensuring complete accuracy.
- Automated Financial Metrics Calculations: Automated analytical algorithms puts vital information at your fingertips without needing custom report creation or analytical calculations.
Download our Intelligent Vendor Management Solutions Brief to learn how to streamline Procurement and Accounts Payable with zero-touch, error-free execution of repetitive, time-consuming tasks.
That's just the tip of the iceberg. Auditoria offers a full suite of SmartFlow Skills intelligently designed to support finance teams and overhaul outdated financial back offices.