In the Accounts Payable process, for many companies, the greatest effort (and cost) is directly tied to headcount that is focused on resolving discrepancies or fixing errors.  Transactions that are “error-free” either require no manual intervention or are quick and easy (and low cost).  While errors can occur in the ordering process, by the supplier, […]

With the consolidation of work activities for Accounts Payable into a few centers globally, it is increasingly common for companies to have the scale required to justify the elimination of work through automation.  Unfortunately, the path to replace paper with electronic invoices has seen a proliferation of approaches that show promise, with no one clear […]

As a follow-up to the December 2013 research brief on the topic of “Mandating Electronic Payments to U.S. Suppliers”, this article takes a closer look at one of the process steps companies often follow when setting up a supplier for electronic payments.  While no longer required, many companies create an Automated Clearing House (ACH) pre-notification […]

As models for Global Process Ownership become more common, increasingly companies are looking for insights from peers to regional or country-specific processing requirements.  When deviations from a global standard are required there is nothing more valuable than having the direct insight into the practices followed by peer companies. Recently, a Peeriosity member used iPollingTM to […]

Achieving low cost per transaction in Accounts Payable (AP) requires effort on many fronts, including getting low dollar non-inventory items onto a purchasing card, increasing the first pass match rate, and perhaps of greatest importance, high rates of processing using either a form of Evaluated Receipts Settlement or the electronic receipt of invoices.  In fact, […]

Energy costs are one of the largest expense categories a company has, which makes it a priority to understand and manage utility-related data.  Yes, if the lights were out last month at one of your company locations, you probably need to pay the electric bill; however, the process of managing utility payments is more complicated […]

A recent PeercastTM featured a $5B manufacturing company with global operations and over 10,000 employees.  While they have a global Shared Services organization in place, there remain challenges to standardizing processes due, in part, to systems differences.  While SAP is used globally, there are three SAP instances, with one for the US, a second for […]

Many would guess that for companies who have USD $5B or more in annual revenues, the practice of daily payment runs by Accounts Payable would be the norm.  That guess would be wrong.  Surprisingly, while roughly half of the large global companies process payments on a daily basis, the other half are making payments on […]

While 93% of companies require a purchase order for the procurement of services, there is a wide range of practices for how receipts are verified. These range from no verification of receipt (typically for utilities or service purchases under a specific dollar amount), negative verification (where performance is assumed unless the requestor responds to indicate […]

In Purchase-to-Pay, it is the exceptions to the process that requires most of the effort by the Accounts Payable team, often with a ripple effect across the entire end-to-end process.  Even companies who have successfully automated most of their direct material transactions with high rates of electronic payments continue to struggle with the biggest frustration […]