Top 5 Must-Dos to Stop Worrying about Paying Bills and Cash Flow
For accounting and bookkeeping businesses, here’s how you and your clients could benefit from simplifying the process of approving accounts payable.
Keeping on top of bills in a large and complex business can be a significant ongoing challenge. Challenges include visibility over all the outgoings, cash flow management so you’re not caught short, fraud prevention measures that don’t give too much power to one person, and compliance rules that insist on transparency around payments.
Automating these processes is a natural next step to make things more efficient. Would you believe that all these things can be fixed by technology? Automation tools can help centralise bill information, automate data entry, establish efficient approval workflows, provide real-time visibility, generate accurate reports, and ensure compliance with regulatory requirements. But wait, there’s more.
Here are the top 5 must-dos to apply in your business processes through automation tools if you want to fix these troubles and improve this process.
1. Streamline approval workflows
Accounting and bookkeeping automation tools like ApprovalMax provide a centralised platform to create custom workflows for specific business requirements. This reduces bottlenecks, helps get payment approved quickly, and keeps business moving forward.
2. Take care of who is approving and share the load
With ApprovalMax, accounting businesses gain better control over spending by implementing robust approval hierarchies and authorisation limits. This helps prevent unauthorised spending and enforce compliance with internal policies. It helps you strike the right balance in approvals. The last thing you want is to hold the process up with bottlenecks, as staff take too long to process it or too much power is afforded to one person. ApprovalMax can help you share the load around.
Brendan Lucas, CA, Founder and Managing Director of Next Dimension Accounting, which serves small businesses and Not-For-Profits (NFPs) across Australia, explains why he agrees that segmenting responsibilities is a good idea.
“If each business manager takes responsibility for their spending, there becomes a sense of ownership over the profit and loss and checks and balances applied. For myself, I don’t see a lot of bills for approval. That’s helped me keep an eye on the big picture but give my Management team accountability for the aspects of the business they are responsible for.”
3. Harness the benefits of real-time visibility and tracking
The software offers real-time visibility into the status of pending approvals and transactions. Want to get things done quicker or find out what items are being delayed? An easy dashboard view improves transparency, accountability, and overall financial management.
4. Better integrate your approvals with your accounting system
How will you or any of your staff know if they should pay the bill? Connection to software like Xero or Quickbooks matters. It also cuts out manual work. This integration ensures that approved spending requests flow directly into the accounting system, eliminating the need for manual data entry and reducing the risk of errors or discrepancies.
5. Improve compliance and audit readiness
ApprovalMax helps with compliance by providing comprehensive audit trails and documentation of approval processes. This simplifies the audit process and ensures that businesses can demonstrate compliance with regulatory requirements when needed.
How this all benefits your accounting practice
or your client’s business
Much of this is laddering back up to saving a lot of money and making more of it, among other things. Here’s how:
Discover cost and time savings. Reduce manual effort, paperwork, and administrative costs associated with managing spending requests.
Remove the headache. The streamlined workflows and efficient processes save time, allowing accounting professionals to focus on more value-added activities.
Collaborate and communicate better. Platforms like ApprovalMax just make it easier to get the job done across teams and talk to each other. Approvers can review and add comments on spending requests and reduce the need for manual back-and-forth communication via email.
Scalability and flexibility. ApprovalMax is designed to easily accommodate changing business needs and change the approval processes, templates, and responsibilities. It’s not set in stone, and everyone can be clear quickly when an approach has changed.
Where to from here?
By leveraging these benefits, accounting professionals can effectively manage spending for their own business and their clients, leading to increased efficiency, reduced risk, and improved financial management.
Want to try ApprovalMax?
You’re just a few steps away from using automated workflows that will save time for the whole team!
Start a 14 day trial