Accounts Payable
Driving AP Success With Automation Part 3: How to Save Time and Money While Increasing Compliance
Outdated, manual AP processes are costly and expose companies to potential fraud. AP automation can save your business both time and money—all while increasing employee compliance.
Driving AP Success With Automation Part 2: How to Create More Efficient Processes With AP Automation
It’s time to ditch the time-worn ways of manual processes. See how automating your AP process can save time and money and lead to a more efficient AP system.
Driving Success With Automation Part 1: 4 Common AP Management Bottlenecks
While not all bottlenecks can be easily circumvented, identifying where things are getting stuck or slowing down is the first and most important step towards eliminating the problem.
Measure What You Manage: How to Make The Case for AP Automation With ROI To Your CEO
Technology plays a key role in almost all business processes, from marketing to payroll and even retirement funding. Accounts-payable (AP) automation is one such valuable tool, but many businesses find themselves wondering if it’s worth the switch.
Unlock AP Success: 3 Topics Every CFO Should Discuss With Their Controller
A recent study showed that 80% of companies have been negatively impacted by the pandemic, with cash flow being a primary issue. Now more than ever, CFOs must embrace their new role as an architect of business value. Optimizing operational costs is key to that endeavor.
Efficiency and Intelligence Are AP’s Pandemic Game-Changers
Although the pandemic began over 1.5 years ago, it continues to impact every enterprise function. In fact, 80% of organizations report being negatively impacted by the pandemic, according to an Emburse survey.
4 Tips for Month-End & Year-End Closing That Finance Managers Should Know
Anyone working on a finance team knows exactly how stressful accounting periods are. There are a ton of last-minute requests, unexpected bottlenecks, and unpredictable delays that arise from running both accounts payable and receivables while maintaining the highest quality and compliance standards.
Don’t Moose Around! Be the Best-in-Class Accounts Payable Team in 2022
Have you seen this video of a moose on the loose blocking traffic on a highway? The lesson here is simple: your accounts payable function can’t have bottlenecks. And those bottlenecks will slow down processes and waste company time, money, and opportunities in 2022.
Using Your Data for Negotiations With Vendors
Maximize revenue. Minimize spending. That’s the key to financial success, right? While following that path is easier said than done, there is a quicker way to reduce your expenses right now: negotiate discounts with your vendors. For example, before the pandemic, major airlines like American Airlines and Delta Airlines offered corporate discounts, benefits, and services to large businesses. By showing them how often your employees paid for their services, you could negotiate meaningful discounts.
What Do Your Expense Management Software and Beanie Babies Have in Common?
While the 1990s may feel like a lifetime ago, the last decade of the 20th century continues to hold a special place in our hearts. How can we possibly forget the Macarena, dad shoes, mom jeans, Polaroid cameras, The Lion King, Friends, Beanie Babies, Tamagotchis, Furby or the dial-up modem jingle?
Bringing in a New Era in Corporate Payments with Emburse Pay
Emburse Pay is a new suite of global payments solutions to simplify, automate, and control corporate expenses. It launches with Chrome River EXPENSE, integrated with Emburse cards and supported with pre-approvals.
Gartner and Ardent Partners Advise How to Build a Best-in-class Accounts Payable Operation
The world of accounts payable continues to evolve, and the COVID pandemic is driving yet more change in the industry as organizations seek to virtualize their AP processes. Learn from experts at Gartner and Ardent Partners about benchmarks and best practices to consider.
When Cash (Control) is King: Is Your Accounts Payable Strategy Optimized for a COVID-19 World?
The dramatic economic shift caused by COVID-19 has led to a sudden need for finance and AP teams to reassess vendor payment strategies, in order to optimize cash reserves. How can organizations ensure that they have the visibility needed to make these critical decisions?
Virtualizing Financial Operations to Adapt to Increased Work from Home Requirements
Working from home will be with us for some time. To ensure everyday operations are disrupted as little as possible, finance teams need to quickly adapt to a virtual environment.
Three Ways Technology Can Optimize Political Campaign Spend
Major political campaigns are like big businesses in many ways. Several hundred million dollars in spend, thousands of employees, offices nationwide, and once the money runs out, time's up. Chrome River general manager Eric White looks how taking a business-like approach to spend management could help prolong a campaign.
Beyond Efficiency: How Spend Data Delivers the Biggest Benefits of Expense and Invoice Management
Manual expense reporting and invoice processing are huge efficiency killers for both business travelers and corporate finance teams. By automating these processes through the implementation of expense and invoice management technology, organizations can save tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. However, the financial benefits of eliminating inefficient use of employees’ time can often just be a fraction of the overall financial benefits. The big-ticket improvements come from the visibility that automation delivers.
How I Did It: Modernizing Invoice Approval for a Rapidly-Growing Organization
The University of Pennsylvania Health System is a diverse research and clinical care organization that includes four hospitals, two regional medical centers and a multitude of clinical care providers. In this guest blog post, Steve Kelly, UPHS’ director of disbursements, outlines how the organization lets business flow by delivering a mobile, highly-automated integrated expense and invoice automation solution.
Five Reasons Why Web Apps are Essential for Speedy Invoice Approvals
Rapid invoice approval is critical for effective cash flow and to maintain effective visibility into the accounts payable process. The kind of technology you use to access this data could play a major factor in your company's ability to deliver this insight.
How an Unfriendly Expense Submission Process can Negatively Impact Your Quarter-close
A company that provides its employees with manual or cumbersome expense reporting solutions may be hurting itself in many ways. One which is often overlooked is that employees who procrastinate over submitting their expenses could jeopardize the accuracy of the quarter-close, which could have serious ramifications.
Invoice Solutions that Finance Teams and Approvers Actually Love
Today we’re delighted to unveil the newest edition of our invoice management software, Chrome River INVOICE. The latest version of Chrome River INVOICE will make it even easier for approvers and accounts payable teams to track and approve invoices, whether they are at their desk or away from the office.
Taking Corporate Cards into the Virtual Age
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The end of the traditional corporate card era is looming. The way that organizations source, pay for, and reimburse business travel has changed more in the past five years than the previous several decades combined.
How Automating Invoice Processing can be a Shot in the Arm for Hospital Finance Teams
Hospitals typically receive a quarter of their invoices outside the PO system - often from smaller, local vendors. Processing these invoices manually can take thousands of hours and cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. What can hospitals do to streamline these processes and reduce administrative costs.
7 Reasons Why the Finance Team Should Push for Expense Management Software
While there's no denying that automating end-user processes and enabling hassle-free mobile submission of expense reports provides major ease-of-use and time-saving benefits for business travelers, the ROI that these benefits deliver is often dwarfed by the impact that expense automation has on the finance function.
Why the Manual Invoice Processing Model Is Broken (And How to Fix It)
Every organization’s finance team knows that controlling supplier costs is critical. However, one area that many organizations have yet to address is the actual cost of the invoice management and processing function.
Expense Reimbursement, I’d Like You to Meet the Real World…
Combining expense reimbursement with the payroll slows your process to a crawl, making your employees wait weeks for payment. Decouple the two and see how much happier you make employees AND finance.
3 Biggest Corporate Card Expense Headaches (and How to Fix Them)
Corporate card programs may make corporate spend better managed and even easier for the card holder, but they still leave a number of hassles for both cardholders and administrators when it comes to expense reports.
How Can Invoice Workflow Automation Work for Your Organization?
Interest in back-office technology continues to increase as a way to control costs and increase productivity. What are the latest trends in the industry, and what benefits could it bring to the way your AP team processes invoices?
What Could Manual AP Processes Be Costing Your Organization?
We recently ran a webinar in conjunction with Vendorin, which discussed some of the challenges faced by CFOs with their accounts payables processes. As part of the webinar, we asked some questions to gauge the current state of invoice automation, and some of the bigger issues currently impacting the function. The upshot of our findings is that, although technology plays a significantly greater role in AP than just a few years ago, there’s still plenty of opportunity to improve efficiency.
Don’t Miss our VANTAGE 2015 AP Automation Speaking Session!
Chrome River is excited to attend VANTAGE 2015 again this year. We have several opportunities to get together with you. Many of you already use Chrome River EXPENSE. We invite you to join our "APAutomation" speaking session on Thursday, June 18 from 2:15 - 3:15 to learn more about Chrome River INVOICE. Also, stop by booth #13 in the Exhibit Hall to say hi!
Survival of the Fittest: Be Ruthless or Die
When it comes to survival of the midsize firm, you have two choices. You can be ruthless. Or you can die. Time is your biggest resource and the one most often abused. Because of the precarious spot in which midsize companies are wedged, inefficient use of time will kill you every time.
The Increasingly Strategic Role of Accounts Payable – Part 2
In Part 1, we looked at the differences between manual and automated expense and invoice entry. So how does automated entry make Accounts Payable more strategic? Here are just a few of the ways that immediately come to mind.
The Increasingly Strategic Role of Accounts Payable – Part 1
Over the past 14 years, I’ve had the good fortune to be part of many business-process-improvement initiatives related to Spend Management. It’s been my experience that often, at first, the Accounts Payable managers are concerned about the impact on their department and can even be reluctant to pursue Accounts Payable automation altogether. I’m not sure if it’s the specter of the way robotics once replaced countless skilled workers in Detroit or the common notion that one day we will all be replaced by machines. It just seems like AP managers are often concerned about losing headcount and control over processes that they have owned for many years.
3 Keys to Solving Common Invoice Headaches
An invoice from a vendor arrives in the day’s mail and sets off a complex process. First, the invoice envelope must be sorted and opened, the return envelopes and ads tucked inside discarded. From there, your company may scan the invoice or key in data and begin validating individual items. By the time the document reaches an approver for payment verification, it’s no mystery why processing paper invoices is often expensive, inaccurate and inefficient.
100% Accuracy: The Secrets of Your Payroll Department
If you’re not actively involved in the operation of your payroll department, you might be under the impression that it really isn’t that complicated. However, if you were to do a little digging, you’d discover the secrets of your payroll department run deeper than you might imagine.
Empower Employees with Mobile Solutions to Improve the Bottom Line
Now that there is an app for nearly every conceivable function, companies have realized that their second largest expense, travel, can be fully automated – bringing a new level of insight, analysis and negotiation to the ubiquitous expense report. Gone are the days of paper, calculators and spreadsheets for the tedious yet mandatory task of reimbursement. In their place are flashy smartphone apps that track the traveler’s location and purchases and create expense transactions automatically. These mobile solutions are linked to cloud-based expense management systems that provide immediate feedback to the employee when policies have been breached. They also provide high-visibility notification for approvers when compliance conditions are not met, allowing firms to exert greater control over their operating expenses to adhere to client requirements and firm policies. Requiring employees to manually complete expense reports, which not only wastes time but also drives up costs through lost productivity and increased staffing, is no longer a viable option. In today’s economy, it’s either increase productivity or suffer reduced profitability.
Learn How Big Companies Streamline AP Automation and Expense Reporting
Those big guys have it made. Large companies have the ability to invest in consultants and analysts to streamline their accounts payable (AP) and expense reporting processes so they can process much more volume in a short amount of time. If only there were ways for small and medium-sized businesses to take advantage of the same capabilities. It would level the playing field and more than likely reduce some operating expenses in the process.
5 Ways CFOs Are Reducing Company Costs Right Now
A requirement of every chief financial officer’s job is to find ways to improve the company’s profitability. Improvements can be accomplished by making the best use of corporate funds and reducing expenses. How CFOs reduce company costs can vary greatly from one business to the next. The industry type, business size and corporate structure are all important factors.
Best Ways for a Small Business To Get a Handle on Finances & Expenses
There is a popular saying in the South that is appropriate in the world of small business: “It’s hard to drain the swamp when you’re up to your elbows in alligators.” For small-business owners, with limited time and resources, it is difficult to keep control of finances when most of your time is spent just keeping the business going. Customers are calling, shipments must be unloaded, orders are pending, and employees are complaining. All of these distractions can keep a small-business owner or manager from taking a hard look at finances.The issue is not necessarily when to examine finances, but how small businesses manage expenses and finances. Applying the following tips could actually give you the time you need to get a handle on your finances:
Automated Invoicing: 3 Ways It Can Improve Efficiency
In any business there are specific questions that should be part of every continuous improvement plan:
Why Your Organization Can’t Risk Expense Report Inaccuracies
Few would argue with the truism “Numbers don’t lie,” but inaccurate numbers can and do lie all the time. A good example is the vast number of inaccurate numbers that can enter an organization’s financial system via expense reports. Organizations that allow employees to write or type expenses into a form that is manually reviewed and re-entered into the accounting system by a staff member have introduced several opportunities to enter inaccurate information for each transaction.
9 Best Practices for Automating your AP Department: Part 3 of 3
In this third and final part of our three-part series, we will conclude our discussion on accounts payable best practices fueled by the excellent article "9 Best Practices for Automating Your AP Department" written by David Schmidt and Katie McMurry for the third-quarter printing of Financial Operations Matters. It provides an excellent roadmap for automation that is both commonsensical and actionable.
9 Best Practices for Automating your AP Department: Part 2 of 3
In this second part of a three-part series, we will resume our discussion of Accounts Payable Best Practices (Part 1) fueled by an excellent article entitled "9 Best Practices for Automating Your AP Department," written by David Schmidt and Katie McMurry. Their work appeared in the Third Quarter printing of Financial Operations Matters and provides an excellent road map for automation that is both commonsensical and actionable.
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Our choice of Chrome River EXPENSE was made in part due to the very user-friendly interface, easy configurability, and the clear commitment to impactful customer service – all aspects in which Chrome River was the clear winner. While Chrome River is not as large as some of the other vendors we considered, we found that to be a benefit and our due diligence showed that it could support us as well as any large players in the space, along with a personalized level of customer care.
We are excited to be able to enforce much more stringent compliance to our expense guidelines and significantly enhance our expense reporting and analytics. By automating these processes, we will be able to free up AP time formerly spent on manual administrative tasks, and enhance the role by being much more strategic.