How AP Automation Helps Fight Fraud

When the pandemic struck, companies around the world began automating their accounting systems to be able to make and receive payments without having to go to the office.

However, the benefits of accounts payable (AP) and accounts receivable (AR) automation aren’t limited to convenience.

For example, the AP automation solutions provider Beanworks provides software to process invoices and speed approvals and payments. However, this technology also protects against fraud in numerous ways, from the elimination of duplicate and fraudulent invoices to safeguards against employee expense abuse.

“The pain points that really kick in are approvals and payments,” Catherine Dahl, the company’s co-founder and CEO, told PYMNTS in an interview. “That’s what is prompting people to start looking [at automation], and when they see that duplicates aren’t being paid anymore, all these fraud protections … are really just the icing on the cake.”

While the ability to identify errors in invoices can save enormous amounts of money over time, artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential do much more. Dahl said that Beanworks is working on BeanFlow, a touchless processing product that uses optical character recognition to read and scan invoices.

In addition, the company is also looking for ways to integrate AP automation tools with automated AR systems to give CFOs a single tool to view entities on both sides of the ledger.

Why Accounts Payable Departments Are Fraud Targets

Payments fraud shows no signs of abating, with AP departments reliant on paper checks a prime target for criminals, according to a survey.

Close to 75% of corporate respondents said their companies saw payments fraud attacks in 2020, with 61% of respondents citing AP departments as the most susceptible business units targeted. And 66% of those cases involved paper checks, which underscores AP automation’s importance in the digital age.

To learn more the importance of AP automation, download the inaugural AP Automation Tracker, a PYMNTS and Beanworks collaboration.