One of the biggest takeaways from the past 16 months of turmoil is that automation is now a critical feature of every corporate financial function. Finance teams that relied on manual, paper-based processes quickly found themselves unable to effectively approve expenses and invoices, make payments, manage cash and perform corporate accounting tasks as soon as employees transitioned to working from home.
The bigger challenges that paper-based processes present go far beyond the drudgery of having to return to the office to pick up invoices or expense reports, or manually enter data into financial systems. Disparate data sources reduce the ability to effectively analyze spend or forecast cash flow. Slow AP processes with manual check payments eliminate the ability to take advantage of vendor early-payment discounts or virtual card rebates. With many companies continuing to face major cash crunches in the aftermath of Covid, a lack of automation across the finance department has turned from an inconvenience to an existential crisis.
This is why we’re extremely happy to launch the latest part of our Emburse Pay suite of solutions: Emburse Pay - B2B Payments. This new solution simplifies the entire accounts payable automation process from remittance to reconciliation, delivering efficient, integrated vendor payments. From receiving an invoice to making the payment, the entire process can be quickly and easily performed in one elegant platform without leaving your Emburse AP solution.
Emburse Pay - B2B Payments bring a wide range of operational and financial savings. Unifying an organization’s invoice lifecycle provides massive savings compared to paying bills manually - payments can be timed to optimize cash flow and find discounts and rebates. This superior reconciliation also offers the ability to leverage flexible electronic payments like virtual cards and ACH, providing a fast, secure way to pay invoices.
These efficiencies and cost savings also increase at scale, and also free up AP teams to focus on more high-value tasks. In addition, Emburse offers enablement services to help onboard your vendors to receive electronic payments. This means that they get paid more quickly and securely. This not only creates happier suppliers and stronger vendor relationships, but can also help speed up payments through the supply chain - critical as we continue our recovery from the pandemic.
Moving into a recovery period will enable organizations to improve their cash position compared to the past year. However, organizations should use the lessons learned from Covid’s impact to harden their processes and make themselves more resilient for when the next downturn inevitably arrives. Emburse Pay - B2B Payments also enables organizations to perform smarter and more timely analysis on their cash position and future outflows, providing them with the ability to optimize payment and make the best use of cash, while avoiding potential short term cash crunches.
There’s really no downside to further automating financial processes: your team becomes smarter and more productive, your ability to manage and optimize cash increases, and the financial savings that can be realized can recoup the investment many times over. If you’d like to see how Emburse Pay - B2B Payments can help turbocharge your organization’s payment processes, contact us for a demo.