Sachin Sharma, founder of ProcureDesk, shows five ways to cut 10+ hours weekly from accounts payable work. Stop manually re-keying invoices, automate invoice-to-PO matching, process invoices daily instead of batching them, capture approvals automatically instead of chasing receipts, and eliminate duplicate data entry across spreadsheets and systems.
If you are a controller or CFO of a growing company, this might be a reality, right? As the company grows, you have more and more supplier invoices to process. Your AP team is working hard every week, but you still, your backlog is growing, your month end is still 10 to 15 days and so on. If that's your reality, then this video is for you. Because in this video I'm going to walk you through five things you can do today to save at least 10 hours per week of your AP time. Now, as AP teams are always working hard, right, to process invoices and it's not their fault that they don't have the right systems to scale the operation because that's kind of the last thing, right? It's always assumed they will take care of it somehow. So let's jump right into these five things. If you're joining me for the first time, welcome. My name is Sachin Sharma. I'm the founder of Procuredesk, where we help growing companies automate their purchasing and AP process. So number one is stop wreaking the data. Like today, you know, we see this very common. I was talking to a controller the other day and he said my team has to key in every invoice in our accounting system. And some of those invoices have 15 or 20 lines. So you can imagine the amount of effort that's required to rekey the data into the accounting system. A simple fix for that is either use automation because today any, I would say good AP system like prequeredesk or would be able to take a document like a PDF or a CSV file or whatever, take the data, ingest it and create the invoice automatically. There's no real need for you to manually enter the data into the system. So that's number one. Number two is manual matching of invoices. So a very common scenario is invoice comes in, we don't know whether we can pay this or not. Maybe you have a purchase order process and a receipt and somebody needs to go and manually match it. That process does not scale. You are probably missing receipts, the information is not right or the data is entered wrong. Whatever the case might be, a simple fix for that is automate the matching process. Let a system look at the invoice and see whether there is a purchase order or if a receipt is missing, automatically inform the other person who needs to create receipt. So you could build a lot of automation in the process so your team doesn't have to manually chase the missing documents for invoice matching. So that's number two. Number three is cut the invoice backlog. Number one reason that you are not able to close books on time is there is too many invoices at the end of the month. Right. And the team has to work weekends to clear up the backlog and so on. The idea here is not let the backlog build up, but have a system that is processing invoices every day. So if you have like an automated, I would say AP system, then every day the invoices can be processed as and when they're coming in from the vendors. Rather than waiting for a week or waiting for even a month to just kind of look at hey, what all invoices we have to process that month, right? So that's number three. Number four is stop chasing receipts and purchase orders. One of the main issue which we see is that either companies don't have a PO process, that means every invoice needs to be approved and that means the invoice approval process gets delayed and you're always chasing people for missing approvals and so on. Or they have a pure process, but they are missing receipts. So there's no way easy way to capture the data like good receipt, note or confirmation that the product or service has been delivered. And that is where technology can automate all that for you. So that only those invoices goes for approval where there's an exception. And if you automatically match your invoice with the purchase order and receipt, for example, and there are a few exceptions, yeah, sure, you can get that approved, right? So that's kind of number four. Number five is avoid duplicate data entry at all costs. Right? There is no point in having a spreadsheet where you're keying in the data or a system where you're keying in the data to get a invoice approval and then take the same information and put it in your accounting system that's based of effort. You're entering the same information multiple times. And it's not just about waste of time. It's also because you are increasing the chances of error. Right? Somebody could just, you know, fat type something or something wrong and now you have same information entered in a different way in another system. A simple fix for that is pick up an AP automation tool that connects to your accounting system so that when the AP system automatically creates the invoice for you. So it avoids the data entry to begin with. But then the second thing is once the data is entered, you do not need to do the same entry in your accounting system, the system should be able to automatically send the data without you being involved, right? So these are the five steps you can take. So if you are struggling with delayed close of books or too many invoices at the end of the month, do these five things right. So stop reentering or reinking the data. Number two is avoid manual matching of invoices. Number three is cut the invoice backlog. Number four is stop chasing receipts and have a system that captures all that for you. And number five is have a system that talks to your accounting system. I hope you like this video. If you are struggling with some of these problems you mentioned today, click on the link below to see a quick video of how an AP solution can help solve these problems for you. Thanks for joining me today and I'll see you in the next video.
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