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4 reasons to automate your Accounts Receivable

Money makes the world go round – and getting paid is essential to running your business. However, it's not a guarantee that customers will pay on time. Payment delays are a headache in terms of cash flow for your business and for your bookkeepers. Luckily, you can relieve some anxiety in your finance team with tools to automate your accounts receivable processes.
Monday, May 1, 2023
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Defining Accounts Receivable automation

Accounts receivable (AR) automation software helps companies streamline their customer invoicing and payment processes, ensuring that invoices are issued correctly so as to avoid delays due to missing reference numbers or delivery to the wrong recipient.

One of the technologies behind AR automation is called robotic process automation (RPA), a basic type of automation that combines artificial intelligence and machine learning.

RPA is a popular technology used to automate tedious and time-consuming finance processes. RPA software can automate accounts receivable processes such as creating invoices and other documents based on company data and templates, batch printing and sending documents and emails, sending electronic reminders at set dates, and reconciling payments.

In this post, we'll discuss several reasons you should implement accounts receivable automation in your finance team. Among other things, we'll discuss benefits such as improving security compliance, saving time, and saving money.

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6 steps to easily streamline your Accounts Payable

1. Save time and money

The cost of manual labor is high - it's no surprise that it is one of many businesses' most significant expenses. As your company grows, those costs continue to rise when you must hire new staff to keep up with all your paperwork and invoice processing duties.

It's frustrating that your team needs to perform tedious and repetitive tasks, knowing that manual labor costs negatively affect your company's bottom line. After all, your job is to ensure that the company makes and retains as much profit as possible.

The number one reason to implement AR automation in your finance team is to save time and money. Automation software can help you save time by, among other things:

  • Quickly creating invoices with premade templates and company data
  • Automatically sending payment reminders to customers
  • Batch printing or sending documents to customers

This software helps your company boost productivity, increase turnover and save money on manual labor expenses. A bonus – digitalizing and automating your processes enables you to save on the financial burden of postage, paper, and ink, which we'll talk about further down.

2. Boost employee satisfaction

Your employees may not be happy with their jobs. The paperwork on their desk keeps piling up, and digging up old invoices to send yet another reminder to your customers is time-consuming and frustrating. You know they’re working hard, yet nothing is getting done.

Working with the same tasks daily without much variance can make one feel stuck. What once was an exciting prospect is now leaving them feeling lackluster and in low spirits at the thought of another day at work - they want to get back to performing duties that fulfill them and make them feel proud of their work.

Automating your accounts receivable process is a surefire way to improve employee satisfaction. By cutting out manual tasks, you lighten the load of that seemingly never-ending pile of paperwork, and your employees can get home on time!

3. Help preserve the environment

Businesses' paper-based processes are not only outdated but are negatively impacting the earth. In fact, paper production is one of the biggest causes of pollution worldwide – polluting water, air, and land. 50% of printed paper is estimated to end up in the trash at the end of the day – that's an exceedingly short lifecycle.

Digitalizing your processes and going paperless will not only benefit the environment, but it will benefit you too! Eliminating paper from your accounts receivable processes reduces paper waste and non-biodegradable ink cartridges. Lowering your company's carbon footprint helps save trees and prevents water pollution, leaving you feeling good about doing your part for the environment.

Read "Creating a paperless office – digitize your processes"

4. Improve security and compliance

Many companies are digitalizing their paper-based processes and are beginning to require electronic invoices. Additionally, e-invoicing is becoming increasingly regulated. Countries in the EU and Australia, the USA, and Canada are using the Peppol format as a standard way to securely exchange invoices and other sensitive documents.

Failing to implement e-invoicing may mean losing out on business opportunities to competitors that fulfill your customers' invoicing requirements. This failure makes you lose your competitive advantage in the market.

Digitalizing your accounts receivable process ensures that your company fulfills your customers' invoicing requirements. Automation software can keep track of your individual customer's invoicing requirements and ensure that you don't send documents containing incorrect information.

It also reduces the risk of fraud through digital signatures and watermarks and ensures that all data is securely stored and shared. Automation software also generates a digital audit trail, making auditing as easy as a single click.

Sit back and let Continia do the work

Continia’s solutions do the tedious and repetitive work for you so that you can relax and do your work without worrying about being overloaded. Continia Document Output is an automated document distribution solution that allows you to step back from manual tasks and enjoy your work again.

Some key features of Document Output are:

  • 40+ ready-to-use templates for speed and flexibility
  • Batch send or print documents to save time
  • Get a complete overview of your customers’ invoicing needs
  • Connect to the Peppol Network
  • Automatically merge and attach PDFs of overdue sales invoices to reminders
  • Sign and watermark or password-protect your PDFs to avoid document tampering
  • Setup rules that automatically ensure recipients get what they need when they need it, and how they what to receive it

To learn more about how Continia Document Output can help you increase productivity and boost your bottom line, click the link below.

Learn more about Document Output