Understanding Integrated Payables and the Impact It Can Have on Your Business

Corporate Payments And Payables

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Emily Rodenhuis

Mar 25, 2019

For organizations struggling with manual, costly and fraud-prone paper-based AP processes, implementing integrated payables could be a game changer. Such a move would go a long way towards reducing costs and increasing efficiencies, plus it would help to achieve greater levels of payment security – all of which are issues that organizations struggle with on a daily basis.

But what is integrated payables and how exactly can it help?

A recent article in Digital Transactions by Jessica Moran, General Manager of Paymode-X Business Solutions for Bottomline Technologies, provides helpful insights to dispel the myths surrounding integrated payables while also detailing the numerous benefits.

According to Moran, there are four main benefits of a truly integrated payables process (although buyer beware, banks use this term to mean lots of different things – thankfully the article gets to the root of that issue as well), including easy integration and streamlined payments; optimized working capital and better AP revenue; maximized efficiency, productivity and cost savings; and reduced fraud risk.

The benefit of maximized efficiency, productivity, and cost savings is perhaps the most intriguing because it gets to the core reason for why organizations that haven’t already made the switch to electronic payments have dragged their feet in doing so. There isn’t time, it’sas simple as that.

Teams that are already overworked and struggling to keep up with day-to-day activities do not have the time to investigate better ways of doing things, even if doing so meant they could revolutionize their processes and dump the manual, repetitive labor of paper processing, finally gaining back the time needed to focus on activities that would drive real value for the business.

According to Moran, “By outsourcing payments to a third-party through integrated payables, organizations can take advantage of economies of scale they couldn’t achieve on their own. External vendors that specialize in making payments can simply do it faster and more cost-effectively. With true integrated payables, a provider will have visibility into a company’s entire payment file, giving them the ability to settle transactions using the lowest cost/highest return payment type on their customers’ behalf. This not only significantly reduces overall costs, but frees up organizations to focus on activities that grow and optimize the business.”

Integrated payables could be just the ticket overburdened organizations need to finally gain control of their payments processes. To learn more about the benefits of integrated payables, check out the full article, “If You Aren’t Doing Integrated Payables, Here’s Why You Should.”

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Emily Rodenhuis

Emily Rodenhuis is a creative marketing writer specializing in content creation. Her work has been featured by BankNews, InfoSecurity, AFP magazine and more.
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