Four Steps to Better Accounts Payable 

The Four Keys to any effective Accounts Payable system, in order to achieve the highest efficiency.

1. Vendor Qualification 

This allows your business to insure that the vendor is supplying you with highest quality goods or services. As a business you want to ensure that you high quality is of great importance in your product in order to stand out from the competition. Implementing an effective vendor qualification program allows a company to get on the same page as their vendor. By coordinating together they are able to achieve quicker payments. Paying vendors in a short amount of time is most beneficial to businesses. Allocating the proper resources, so payments can be made on time can be quite difficult. Unless you have payment schedule set up with the vendor to ensure a quick easy payment. The vendor master list should also be set up to where there is a system of checks and balances to ensure that no falsified vendors are created.

2. Purchasing

Ensuring that your business has all the materials it needs to run affectively, but not having the cash to do so. This is a problem that all businesses face, but they are still able to get the materials they need though the use of an open account, or Accounts Payable. Using Accounts Payable allows business access to capital with payment scheduled at a later date. Manually entering a transaction can be time consuming and increase cost. A way around this is by integrating the ERP system to post transactions automatically.

3. Invoicing

Invoicing is one of the most important aspects in the Accounts Payable Department. As such it can be easily taken advantage of by employees. The employee that writes up the invoice should be different from the employee who pays the invoice. Also the person who approves the invoice should be different. This is where a system of checks and balances should be put into place to ensure that employees do not commit fraud. The more employees that review the invoice then there is more truthfulness to the invoice. If one person handles all of the invoicing then there is not a lot of accountability. Although you do not want it to go through too many people. As a result the cost associated with that invoice would be high and eat at the bottom line. There should also be a module in place that checks for duplicate invoices. This ensures that the company’s financial position is accurate, and that fraud is mitigated.

4. Payment and Reconciliation

Payments need to be made on time. With all the late payment fees and interest the best practice is for a company to make payments to vendors on time. This is where taking the time to get to know your vendors and creating a relationship pays off. By knowing when you are expected to make payments you can prepare for the future to ensure you have to appropriate amount of money.