APIs Help Lean Accounts Payable Departments Do More With Less

Companies must do more with less when it comes to accounts payable.

“What I am seeing,” Kenneth Apple, vice president of customer success at Routable, told PYMNTS of the company’s corporate clients, “is that people are being cautious. They’re being financially safe — and making decisions through the lens of, ‘I have a limited number of dollars — and how can I get the most return on those dollars?’”

And when it comes to managing AP processes — the money owed to creditors — there’s a set amount of work that has to be done, and efficiency is critical.

Efficiency, Apple said, need not mean that enterprises need to cut staff. Instead, they need to think in terms of team efficiency. A vast majority of the team’s time, according to Apple, is spent on repetitive tasks tied to invoice generation and other back-end workflows.

Apple noted that an increasing number of firms have given their finance teams approval to automate their activities through API or with other technologies.

Becoming More ‘API Forward’

“They’ve been able to be more ‘API forward,’” Apple said, as they seek to automate their AP processes at scale. Against that backdrop, many firms are seeking platforms and partnerships (such as through Routable) that can shrink the average time for a payable to be addressed and reduce the 80% of tasks that are done manually to about 50%.

We’re seeing an end to the weaponization of AP, said Apple, where firms charge counterparties a proverbial nickel a day to pay on time (or earlier). Now, Apple said that modernized AP solutions can help guarantee speed of payment and transparency, which can drive loyalty from a company’s customer base.

He offered up the example where a gig economy firm can cement loyalty from drivers and delivery workers by making sure they can get paid with flexibility. Nurses on the night shift, for another example, find value in getting paid at the end of their shift.

Accuracy of payments — and communicating when those payments will arrive — can also be a benefit as companies pay their vendors, Apple said.

“If you get a note that says the payment’s on its way, and it’s going to be in your account in 48 hours, it needs to be on the way and in their account in 48 hours,” he told PYMNTS. “You’d better have a trusted solution and easy solution, an understandable solution, and one that has built into it that if there’s a deviation, [the recipient’s] funds are not going to arrive for another day – and they know this in advance.”

Looking ahead, he said the macro pressures that are in place and likely to persist into the next year and beyond will demand that businesses reexamine their internal processes. The ideal AP solution is not going to be one that is simply is a matter of “set it and forget it … but one that’s set it and watch the firm grow.”