Accounts payable better practices – for the 21st century


This white paper is based on better practices emerging from an in-depth ten year study of accounting functions and interaction with over 1,000 accounts payable officers.  Accountants and accounts payable staff will benefit from this session, which provides an opportunity for accounts payable teams to white paper ideas with each other.  David Parmenter points out how the accounts payable team is the centre of the finance team and timely and accurate information cannot be delivered without the AP team working with 21st century better practices and technologies.

This paper is to be read by all accounts payable staff together with an accountant who would be best positioned to support them with better practice changes. This paper covers over 50 better practices and technologies.

Content:

  • implementing 21st century accounts payable technology and techniques
  • reducing up to 60% of your volume from the AP ledger
  • the benefits of the purchase card and recipient-created invoices
  • moving towards a paperless AP function (electronic purchase orders, scanning etc)
  • streamlining payments – how to throw away the cheque book, web based remittances etc
  • working more efficiently and effectively with suppliers and budget-holders
  • how to get your budget holders to comply to AP procedures
  • ways to improve the day to day A/P administration (handling purchase orders, purchase invoices, etc.)
  • A/P staff issues (recruitment, training, increasing team morale)
  • how to cut-off A/P promptly so month end reports can be prepared by day 3 or less

What you will gain

  • Access to electronic versions of all templates
  • identify the accounts payable better practices they wish to adopt to score goals for the AP team
  • employ the chosen AP better practices
  • recall the ways the accounts payable team can help accounting team with prompt month-end reporting

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. The impact of better practices on the accounts payable workload
  3. Administration improvements
  4. Cut-off improvements
  5. Staffing improvements
  6. Accounts payable re-engineering improvements
  7. Payment improvements
  8. Relationship with budget holders improvements
  9. Relationship with suppliers improvements
  10. Systems improvements
  11. Benefits of quick monthly reporting to management and the Finance team
  12. Case study one Johnson & Johnson vision products USA
  13. The common bottlenecks at month-end for the AP team and techniques to get around them
  14. Workshop change with month-end routines in the Accounting team
  15. Sources of information
  16. Presenter biography
  17. Appendix 1 Checklist of the 50+ ways to improve your accounts payable systems & procedures
  18. Appendix 2 Checklist of implementation steps to reduce month-end reporting time frames