“The most dangerous phrase in the language is, ‘We’ve always done it this way.’” – U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper
The quote above encapsulates what we’ve been trying to say this entire month regarding the fear of change. And automating your AP process is certainly that. It’s a big change.
How often in life do we make excuses simply because we are scared to take the next step, especially when that next step is into something new?
Change can be scary. But as we wrote earlier this month, there is one thing scarier than change: not changing.
Many of the AP professionals have had some concerns about automation, and that’s understandable given that it’s an entirely new concept for many of them. But they also had some concerns about the way they were currently doing things. They had concerns that the manual AP process – despite being in place for many years – had some shortfalls and inefficiencies that could easily be remedied in today’s age.
In short, they saw room for improvement and growth.
Growth in and of itself can be scary. Growing your company requires a leap of faith and an expenditure of resources not unlike when you began your company in the first place. Here at AvidXchange, we’ve seen this firsthand as our company has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years.
And if there’s one thing we have learned during this time, it’s that you can’t afford to sit back and rely on the status quo. You can’t be afraid if you want to grow your company, and AP automation can help you do that by saving you time and money and putting a scalable process in place.
We ask that you think critically about your current process. Ask yourself why you are scared to move away from the manual, paper-based approach to accounts payable.
See if you can come up with a good reason for not automating without resorting to the most dangerous phrase in the language: “We’ve always done it this way.”
