Rethinking Remote Work with Automation: Addressing Efficiency & Security Concerns in Your AP Process

Your accounts payable team is essential, as they play a critical role in managing your organization’s cash flow. Now in a largely remote work landscape, AP automation solutions ensure your team can continue to collaborate and work efficiently and securely from home. Here are a few ways your organization can maintain business continuity in a virtual environment.

How to Maintain AP Productivity While Working from Home

Cloud-based, automated systems can provide your AP team with the functionality they need to perform their jobs from just about anywhere. Access to all of their invoices, the ability to request and obtain approval and authorization, and electronic processing of payments are all at their fingertips with an AP automation solution. It’s this level of remote functionality that empowers your staff to continue performing at a high level without sacrificing time or quality of work. Here are a few benefits of adopting an AP automation solution for remote employees.

• Eliminates Manual Work: With automation, there is no need to physically handle checks, chase down signatures, or stuff and stamp envelopes. All these tasks can be handled digitally so you can continue to deliver timely payments to vendors without losing any control.
• Vendor Management: It’s critical to make sure your AP team knows how your vendors are faring if their normal operations are changing, and how the payables process might be affected or interrupted. With AP automation you can guarantee your AP team has the visibility and control to accommodate vendors’ needs including the convenience of electronic payments over physical checks. With Paypool vendors can even submit invoices electronically and check invoice status via the vendor portal.
• Employee Communication: Without a physical space to talk through challenges, it’s important to have a system that provides transparency. AP automation solutions layout information in an easily understandable and searchable format so you can always access the answers you need within a few keystrokes. Additionally, Paypool offers customizable workflows so your team can create approval paths, receive notifications, and schedule payments. Your tasks stay on schedule without the need for endless Zoom calls.

How AP Automation Minimizes Risk While Working Remotely

In a world where remote work is the norm, it’s crucial for businesses to enact security measures that prevent data breaches and fraud. An unsupervised work environment is ideal for fraud. AP automation provides a secure platform for your business to execute transactions and a level of fraud protection that simply cannot be replicated offline.

• Separation of Responsibilities: AP automation supports the segregation of duties, which allows the right people to authorize the right payments. The separation of responsibilities is customizable to your team’s hierarchy and discourages fraudulent transactions.
• Audit Trails: Another feature that helps mitigate these risks is an easily accessible audit trail. Solutions like Paypool timestamp every action so you can look up what happened to an invoice before it gets to you. By having this transparency, accounting managers are able to easily track all transactions in a company’s accounting system, whether they are at the office or at home.
• Dual-Factor Authentication: Automated accounting systems add an extra layer of security via dual-factor authentication to ensure that every employee involved with AP is protected from unauthorized account logins or takeovers. In a setting where employees work remotely, dual-factor authentication provides insurance that all transactions are supervised by the correct approver.

Get Started with AP Automation

Automated AP fully supports working remotely; in fact, it allows employees to work just as efficiently as if they were in the office physically. Especially now, when working from home is so important, workflow efficiency and productivity are key.

Paypool is an AP automation solution that provides organizations with the ability to safely manage their accounts payable remotely while saving employees from a tedious workflow. Learn more with a live or pre-recorded demo.

Brian Acton, Marketing Coordinator at Paypool
Brian has marketing experience at agencies and internal marketing departments. Since 2015, Brian has managed Paypool’s marketing department.