Expanding AP Automation Enterprise-Wide and Transforming Spend Management

Earlier in this SME interview series, Joe Lombardi, Ottimate’s manager of solutions engineers, told us how accounts payable departments are optimizing workflows and integrating AP automation tools with ERP systems. In this third and final installment, Joe reveals how Ottimate can create enterprise-wide efficiencies, shares some tips and favorite features such as spend management, and explains why removing manual processes helps organizations meet their goals.

OTTIMATE: Do multiple departments often use Ottimate?

JOE LOMBARDI: Yes, and this highlights one of the benefits of Ottimate. Finance isn’t the only team that cares about an invoice. It can impact a department head’s budget or the operation team tracking equipment, but they often don’t see it until the end of the month. With Ottimate’s workflows and approval policies, they can get involved at an early stage before the invoice even gets into the ERP system, validate it, and see its impact. Others can guide how that invoice gets mapped or coded. The AP team are the core users but there are touch points across the organization.

OTTIMATE: What advantages do clients report once they’re up and running?

JOE: I check in with the customers I work with to get their feedback. The biggest piece is Ottimate improving quality of life. AP is an extremely daunting task when it’s all manual and you’re never going to get out from underneath all that paper. If you have 100 invoices to manually process today, you always will tomorrow until you find a different way to handle them. Ottimate gives them more free time to focus on more complex challenges, like performing analytical tasks and understanding where their dollars are going.

Other advantages are more seamless approvals and efficiency in getting invoices into ERP software. We can shorten the time to book an invoice from a week or more to just a couple of days. We have reports to show clients that type of efficiency, which leads to cost savings because time is money. They’ll also have more accurate financials and lower risk overall.

OTTIMATE: What are some of your favorite features in Ottimate?

JOE: The first thing I love about Ottimate is having so many different methods for uploading, like email, scanning, mobile capture, and EDI. If you’re a finance manager and you’ve got a multi-entity organization with satellite locations receiving invoices, before Ottimate, you had to wait until they came to you. Now they upload and you get them the same or next day.

Our spend management tool eliminated petty cash when I was a restaurant CFO, so I didn’t have to worry about theft, count cash, or match it with receipts. Closing the monthly books was a breeze because I mapped and coded intercompany transactions and could see senior leaders’ transactions in real time instead of reconciling their credit card statements.

You can also set rules for GL mapping specific vendors. If you have a utility vendor, you know what GL account Ottimate will map their bill to, so you don’t have to, and it flows right into your ERP system. The statement reconciliation tool is a favorite because that used to be a time suck. I had to print the reconciliation report from my ERP, match it to the vendor statement, find discrepancies, and go back to the vendor. Ottimate shows discrepancies and missing invoices in seconds, populates an email to the vendor, and your reconciliation process is done in a couple of minutes instead of hours.

OTTIMATE: And as a former end user who has held several different roles in this space, what are some of the Ottimate features you wish you’d had earlier in your career?

JOE: I like that you can split line items or invoices in Ottimate to account for intercompany transactions. Especially when it comes to multi-entity management, doing a lot of those is probably the biggest slog of the end of month process and being able to do that in Ottimate saves a lot of time, confusion, and pain. I’d have this huge spreadsheet matrix that I had to use and not having to do that was a godsend.

Being able to collaborate with my team members in Ottimate, flag an invoice, and ask them to review it made it more efficient for me to get my work done. I didn’t have to worry about sending an e-mail and wonder if they saw it because they were using Ottimate every day too, looking up their invoices, reviewing those that came in, and doing their approvals. Everybody was more communicative.

It was also easier to set up all my payments, plan them out, see what my cash flow was, and know whether I was exceeding my budgets. It was powerful to have all these features without needing to pay for a complex ERP to do the same things.

OTTIMATE: With those ERP systems, do you feel like the AP automation they provide might be more of a Band-Aid than a fully-fledged feature set?

JOE: Yes, I think that’s an accurate statement. They might say, “We offer this particular solution” but it’s not really fully fleshed out and it’s just enough for you to get by. We work with Restaurant365, and it has an AP automation tool, but it’s very clunky at scale. If you’re just working with five, 10, or 20 invoices a day, maybe it can get you through that. But if it’s hundreds a day, it’s going to slow you down immensely.

We also work with another ERP system called M3, and it has something called intelligent document imaging. It’s the same thing: at scale, these systems break down. That’s where the ERP features that you’re describing come up short. In a small environment they’re OK, but when you are a mid-market or enterprise business and you’re scaling, you don’t have time for something that’s not built for scale. And Ottimate is.

OTTIMATE: How does Ottimate impact customers’ core metrics and goals?

JOE: I haven’t met a business yet that isn’t looking to find ways to save money. If we’re talking about reducing costs as a goal, we can help clients in a number of ways. We’re going to limit the addition of headcount as you scale. And then when it comes to payments, we’ll reduce the amount of dollars you spend on the checks you issue. Printing on check stock can make the cost of each five, six, or 10 dollars, which is reduced to $1.54 in Ottimate. Facilitating ACH or virtual card payments can cover the costs of Ottimate by delivering vendor rebates, and we don’t charge transaction fees like some software companies.

If we’re talking about efficiency, time, and getting reports done in a timely manner to close out the month and get P and Ls out to stakeholders, Ottimate is helping our clients speed that up. Accrual reports help them understand which invoices are still in the process but need to be accrued for in the ERP so they can close the books. Your month-end is going to be a lot easier because everybody already saw everything that was going on while they were approving those invoices. So there will be less questions during the review process, fewer iterations of the financial reports after review, and no surprises for senior stakeholders, which reduces their frustration.

OTTIMATE: And what are some ways that you measure the objective or subjective value Ottimate provides?

JOE: You don’t feel like you’re coming into a mountain of paper. You’re not chasing people day in and day out to get approvals on particular invoices. You know where your payments are going, you know that your vendors are receiving them, and your statement reconciliation piece is easier.

We do ROI exercises with our clients where we show them what they’re doing today, the amount of human capital it takes, and the associated cost. When they put Ottimate into place and start reducing the amount of time, here are all the savings they’ll achieve plus the rebates they’re going to get. Ottimate can quickly save thousands of dollars.

OTTIMATE: What are a few tips for using Ottimate effectively?

JOE: Having a scanner in your organization programmed with your Ottimate email address is extremely useful for getting invoices in. To maximize productivity, you need to reduce friction. Dropping 300 invoices into the scanner, hitting the “upload to Ottimate” button, and letting it automate digitization makes things easier.  

Also, let everybody in the organization have access to Ottimate. If something’s important to another department, they’ll ask for it when they see the P&L, so let them be an approver now. And empower your operations team to be a part of the AP process. I’ve talked with so many clients who have said to me, “I don’t want my managers uploading or coding invoices.” I understand, but you’re going to find a lot more efficiency if you let them start the invoice process. All they have to do is upload. They shouldn’t have to send it to you, as that just creates more work.

Then take advantage of our spend management product to create a purchase authorization process in your organization. Users can request a virtual card when they want to buy something like a printer, so you don’t have to give out corporate credit card information. You still have corporate control of spending, and people can get what they need in an efficient way.

One of the biggest things as a financial leader is ensuring that you have control and know where your dollars are being spent. I don’t think there’s any tool greater than Ottimate to help you achieve that particular goal because it’s just going to give you a lot of visibility on your spend. That’s going to help you make better business decisions at the end of the day, reduce risk, and not have to add more people.

OTTIMATE: Where do you see this platform and AP automation going next?

JOE: When it comes to the future of Ottimate, some of the stuff coming out of our AI team is going to be incredible. It’s going to improve our processing times, our accuracy on invoices, and make creating approval policies so much easier for our clients. We’ll also start to incorporate natural language processing into areas of our product. We’ve had a lot of strong team members join Ottimate in the last six months and with their leadership and direction, we’re in a good spot.

Want to see how Ottimate can transform your AP processes? Contact us today!

Need a recap of our previous interviews with Joe? Check out part one and part two!