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Resources   /   Mastering Fundamentals of AP Automation

Chapter Eight: Liberating Your Employees

Automation paves a path to boosting productivity and business growth while eliminating paperwork.

If your company automates its AP processes, your finance team will no longer have to spend hours on mundane, manual tasks. These include typing huge amounts of invoice data, matching paper invoice data to purchase order data and chasing down people for invoice approvals.

The even better news?

With all this extra time, you’ll be liberated to work on projects that add more value to the business and help grow your career.

Business advisor: to help change processes

You can spend more time, for example, as a business advisor. In this role you could analyze spending patterns of various customers. Based on this, you’ll be able to develop and share business advice for changing the way your company processes invoices and payments, how fast it pays certain vendors, and which early payment discounts you want to take advantage of.

Financial analysis: to help cut costs and increase profits

You’ll also have more time to do financial analysis. You could analyze the amount of revenues and expenses your finance department generates each year and recommend specific technologies to invest in to cut costs and turn in higher profits.

And you will be liberated to sharpen your ability to forecast cashflow and how that all relates to the company generating more profit and growing revenues. You can figure out, for example, how the AP software technology investments your company makes can improve productivity and customer retention.

You could also spend more time on financial planning. That means grasping the big picture goals of your company. By focusing most of your time on where the company should transition, you would provide more strategic insights that would help your business grow and accelerate your career.

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Internal controls specialist: to improve regulatory compliance

You could also spend more time as an internal controls specialist. In this role, you could analyze how well your company complies with regulations and recommend ways to do this more efficiently to lower operating costs.

More education and training

From an education standpoint, you could spend more time taking specialized training courses and pursuing academic degrees, such as master of business administration, often needed for higher-level financial positions including controllers and CFOs.

An MBA program, which covers a full spectrum of business disciplines, would be a great way to prepare yourself for positions of more responsibility and leadership.

If you want to get promoted to higher levels of responsibility such as an accounting or finance department director, you can take specialized training such as finance, accounting and business strategy courses.

Along these same lines, you’ll benefit from training yourself to think like a CFO by focusing on how you measure performance and assign value to it. You’ll have more time to sharpen your ability to “connect the dots” of market and technology trends to foresee what’s coming in the next six months. Your CFO thinks about this often. So should you if your goal is to rise into higher levels of responsibility in the corporate finance profession.

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