Why Your Vendors Keep Asking Where Their Payments Are

If you are a controller of a growing company, your AP team might be overloaded with vendor payment requests. Is my invoice paid and or was it a process? Vendors are continuously chasing your team with these questions. An AP team is checking each and every invoice to figure out the status and so on. If that is you, this video is for you. Because in this video I'm going to break down three reasons why this happens, why you don't have vendor payment visibility and how to go about fixing that. 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 their AP processes. So let's jump right in. Number one reason is you don't have any payment status visibility. So here's a very common scenario. Let's say take a charter school, a teacher goes out, buy some supplies. Invoice hasn't been received or it's received but it is in somebody's approval queue. You don't know when an invoice will be approved, you don't know when it'll be paid. A simple fix to this problem is build a payment dashboard. As and when an invoice is received in your system, you should put that in the dashboard. It could be a spreadsheet or it could be a system like Procare Desk. But then now you have complete visibility in terms of okay, we have received the invoice, what is the status of the invoice and when it will be paid as per the payment terms that you might have with the vendor. So when a vendor calls, you can easily look up and provide that information. Number two is manual payment approval process. We see this very common, let's say in biotech companies where a scientist might go and order some supplies and or might be an equipment. AP gets the bill. They don't know whether they can pay this or not. So they route in via an email for the invoice to be approved. And now they're waiting for the invoice to be approved. They don't know when it will be approved and so on. A simple fix for this would be to do automated approvals. Have a system where you can route it for approval. That way you can track the visibility and you can also set up rules so that it automatically goes to the right person based on the name on the contact or on the invoice document and so on. So it provides visibility but also speeds up the time it takes to process the invoices. Number three is no connection between purchase order receipts, invoice and payments. Here's a very common scenario. We see this in construction all the time. Vendor sends an invoice two weeks after they send a reminder, looks very similar, invoice gets processed and if you're not paying attention, the approver might approve the same invoice twice and you pay the same invoice twice. Might be slightly different number right? And it's not your fault everybody's dealing with so much invoices in a day. Like your approvers have other jobs to do, right? To manage the sites and where they're working rather than approving invoices. So a simple fix would be to implement a three way match process where a invoice is matched to a PO and a receipt so that if the same invoice is coming twice, the system is able to catch it and then route it to the right person for review and check if this really duplicate at all. So just to recap, if you are dealing with vendor payment visibility issues, implement these three things. Number one is a payment dashboard, number two is automate the approval process and number three is implement a three way match process. If your team is struggling with any of those issues, click on the link below to schedule some time with our Product specialist and we'll walk you through how procurex can help solve these challenges. Thank you for joining me today and I'll see you in the next video. Thanks for watching.