Sachin Sharma, founder of ProcureDesk, shows how to speed up month-end close with four automation steps: centralize invoice capture through one intake system, automate two-way or three-way matching to flag only exceptions, auto-generate accrual reports, and lock the month on a set date to eliminate last-minute invoices.
Is day 10 of the month end process and you are still waiting on invoice approvals to close the month. If this sounds familiar, you are not alone. Many growing AP teams have the exact same challenge. In this video, I'm going to give you three simple things that you can implement with AP automation to help you reduce the time it takes to close your books and stick till the end. Where I will share a simple tip that you can implement to reduce the last minute exceptions to the month end close process. If you're joining me for the first time, welcome. My name is Sachin Sharma. I am the founder of procuredesk, where we help growing companies automate procurement and AP processes. So number one is centralize the invoice capture process. You don't want invoices coming on every email or paper, whatever the case might be, right? Have a single process to capture all that. So with AP automation technology, you can make sure that emails are automatically read. You can read an email, create an invoice using OCR or AI technology, or use a vendor portal for vendors to submit the invoices, or use EDI cxml. Those are some of the benefits that automation can help you with. And streamline the invoice capture process so you're not missing invoices. Number two is automate the invoice matching process. So if you have a PO process, so you have a PO and an invoice and a receipt and you're doing a three way or a two way match process, then that takes time, right? You gotta go figure out line by line whether the invoice matches the purchase order or the receipt or not. That is where automation can help. So with AP automation you can automatically match and only review the exceptions to that match. That way your team is not spending time on reviewing every single invoice or routing it for approval. So make sure that the exceptions are sent for approval. But only exceptions, not all the invoices. Right? That's number two. Number three is have a process to generate the accruals. So rather than focusing on manual accruals, kind of looking at hey, what have we received that is not invoiced yet or what is invoice but it's not received yet or anything like that, you can just have the tool run a report and send it to you by the end of the month so you know what your accruals look like. So that can speed up the month end close process and you're not manually doing that. Right? So those are the three simple things which automation can help you with and reduce the month end cycle time. So now about the tip that I talked about on how you can reduce exceptions to your month end quotes process. And that's simple. Have a automated close process so that after a certain days in the month your month is actually locked. That means no more new invoices can come through and any new invoices after that date will go to the next month. Right. So that's kind of a simple strategy you can implement in any AP automation tool that any invoice that is coming after that date, it automatically goes to the next month so you're not kind of waiting on invoices and so on. So just to summarize three simple steps, centralize the invoice capture, automate the invoice matching process and make sure you have automated accruals. Now if you like this video, feel free to hit subscribe button and thank you for joining me today and I'll see you in the next video.
