Outsourcing supplier management

Outsourcing your invoicing (Accounts Payable, AP) function to a highly experienced and trusted team is a great way to reduce costs and unlock cash flow in your business.

As a business owner, you need to watch out for some common issues that could leave you trapped in a cycle of poor service and high fees that put you at risk of irreversible damage to your customer and vendor relationships.

We have years of experience working with business owners and their trusted tax advisors across a wide range of industries, which has allowed us to refine and automate the AP function. Contact us today to find out more.

Why should you outsource your supplier management?

Outsourcing supplier management (AP) means hiring a third party to handle your business bills. The extent of work here can vary widely.

An outsourced AP department can take on all or just one part of the AP cycle including:

• requisitions
• purchase orders
• vendor master file
• invoice matching
• creditors statement reconciliation
• weekly and monthly payment runs
• aged payables management

What does it mean to outsource?

First, let’s clear up a common misconception: ‘AP outsourcing’, or outsourced supplier management, doesn’t just mean sending the work overseas! While this might be common practice for some, it’s far from the best option for all businesses.

For a complex organisation, it’s preferable to outsource AP to an accounting or bookkeeping firm like us — often the same one that already manages your monthly bookkeeping. Working together, we can:

• Give you access to the best tools and people
• Reduce your invoice processing costs, using efficient and automated solutions and well-established workflows.
• Provide the infrastructure, training and oncosts that would normally impact your Profit and Loss
• Offer reporting and stats on various key items, including cost per invoice, time to payment and tasks such as analysis, month end and year end close, reconciliations and AP document management

Security against errors and fraud

Our procedures are built to ensure that errors from double payment, overpayments and theft do not occur. We have a robust system that includes a complete segregation of duties between those that enter the invoice data and the final payments using a secure treasury management process

It is challenging to think that someone you work with is capable of a crime. But it can happen!

In some circumstances, it has been found that long-term employees who have been given confidential and trusted access to sensitive duties are often the committers of fraud.

Segregating duties is a simple but effective control in eliminating the temptation of fraud. At AccountCom our approach is no single AP employee has control of multiple aspects of the AP process.

We segregate the following duties.

• Custody of bank access
• Record keeping
• Reconciliation
• Authorisation
• Payment process

By embracing our approach, which embeds security considerations throughout the AP cycle, you can rest easy knowing your business is safeguarded against loss due to fraud or error.