Member Article

Taking Accounts Payable beyond finance

Invu (www.invu.net), the document management, accounts payable and purchasing solutions provider, today announces the launch of its first cloud-based automated accounts payable service: Invu Verify.

Using its significant experience of automating the accounts payable process using on premise software, Invu is bringing in increased visibility, control and efficiency to the account payable process.

The process of taking a supplier invoice from the point of receipt to being approved and ready for payment, is often regarded as the sole responsibility of the accounts function. Yet, the responsibility for budget management often lies outside the accounting function.

To date, much of the focus for invoice automation software has been on the accounting part of the process: the capture and coding of an invoice and posting it to a finance system. However, these offerings do not address how the invoice arrives in the accounts department in an approved state.

Invu Verify goes beyond this standard process by additionally enabling the business to include a distributed approval process. The solution can be easily configured by the process owner to deliver either single- or multi-person approval, with financial limits across a range of departments or projects. Only those responsible for approval receive approval requests. Furthermore, there is also the capability of allowing delegation of the coding process where applicable.

Targeted at users of Sage 50, Invu Verify shifts the work away from mundane tasks like data entry and posting invoices, towards valued added activities like review and analysis and dealing with exceptions.  

Ian Smith, GM and Finance Director at Invu, said: “Once a business reaches a certain scale, the approval of invoices is often delegated to managers who in turn can be spread across a wide range of locations. This introduces a whole new range of risks and delays into the invoice approval process. These include visibility - where the invoice sits in the process; identity - who is signing it off; and authority - are the approvals applied consistently in accordance with the rules.

“With Invu Verify, the managers can be certain they are consistently fed invoices they should be approving, see the related invoices, and take ownership of the coding. They no longer have to manage the documents in their in-tray or work out whether they should be the one to approve it. Nor do they have to feel they do not truly own the budgets for the departments or projects they are responsible for because Finance allocate everything.”

Finance departments are ready for this change. A new report by Invu conducted in October 2019 found that 44% of finance workers think that automating processes would make them more productive, with one in five (22%) claiming they would welcome automation in their business.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ian Smith .