Accounts Payables Automation update (Part 1) — Re-evaluating the sector’s technology developments

Accounts payables is a business process with great operational workload that needs to be handled with great efficiency and effectiveness. If not done well, it might generate significant additional costs to the business and add risks like business fraud or damage commercial relationships with suppliers — all of which harm a company’s bottom line.

Although the pain points of the accounts payable process are the same today as in the past, the importance of its automation has become greater recently as businesses look for more value creation than just operational efficiencies. And that counts even more so with the arrival of COVID-19, which has shaken up the status quo of all companies’ processes.

Today, procurement technology providers have been funded with millions of dollars to create better solutions to automate this process and improve AP’s integration with other business processes, like procurement (2- and 3-way match), accounting (reconciliation), and treasury (cash flow optimization).

New technologies and the development of advanced solutions have made it possible for many more companies to have access to AP automation solutions that were previously unthinkable for an SME, and for large and global companies. Examples include the cloud, API integrations, artificial intelligence, RPA, digital payments, data extraction solutions, etc.

Therefore a year ago, we at Spend Matters started with a new SolutionMap category that compares AP Automation offerings.

However, the evolution of the AP automation solutions in 2020, and the sector’s push to include other business processes, has led us to rethink the approach we take toward the AP automation function and how we'll analyze it in 2021.

In this three-part Spend Matters PRO series, we will explain what we are seeing in the AP automation market, the components of our analytical approach and the state of the AP automation solution market.