Scaling AP Operations, Expediting Workflows, and Integrating with ERP Systems
by The Ottimate Editorial Team
Scaling AP Operations, Expediting Workflows, and Integrating with ERP Systems (Joe Lombardi Part 2)
During the first part of our Q+A with Joe Lombardi, Ottimate’s manager of solutions engineers, he explained how AP automation is creating efficiencies in invoice processing, spend management, and catalog price matching for clients in hospitality, grocery/retail, and many other industries. In this second part, Joe shares how Ottimate alleviates common pain points, integrates with ERP systems, and enables organizations to scale AP operations without adding headcount.
OTTIMATE: What did a typical customer’s accounts payable process look like prior to using Ottimate and what were some inefficiencies?
JOE LOMBARDI: I’ll speak from my own experience because my first job was in accounts payable, and that’s what makes me such a good fit for the role that I’m in. It was an extremely arduous process. I would have to get my invoices, manually enter them into QuickBooks, and then file them. When it was time to pay, I’d pull the invoices out of the file, print out all the checks, make sure that the invoice was correct, attach the checks to the invoices, get the checks signed, and then put all that stuff back into the filing cabinet again.
Every six months, I would have to move filing cabinet A across the office to file cabinet B so I could fill the first one with new invoices. There was a lot of paper to move around and I’m a pretty progressive guy, so I was always interested in trying to automate wherever I could. When it comes to the AP process, there’s too much manual work that goes hand in hand with handling paper. One of the things that I always ask customers is how long it takes from when they first receive an invoice to when it’s fully entered into their ERP software. It might take a week or a week and a half. Ottimate can reduce that to just a couple of days at most. There’s real value in that.
OTTIMATE: What were some other typical pain points in a customer’s process before using Ottimate?
JOE: Inventory accuracy. Whatever data entry errors occur, they’ll affect your inventory numbers. You want to have everything accurate there. You might have skipped missing invoices or credit memos, or not captured documents from vendors that you didn’t see. I spoke with one client who said they got a $50,000 bill from Coca-Cola that they didn’t know was outstanding for six months. If a CEO is planning a budget and then all of a sudden, they have a $50,000 bill, they’ll have to adjust everything because of that.
Other issues include losing something in a filing cabinet, not getting approvals on time, or a document sitting in a team member’s outbox or inbox for days while you’re trying to get it approved. Now you have greater visibility because everything is contained within our cloud product. And finally, there’s the liability of cash to consider. With our VendorPay product, you’re going to reduce the risk of theft and liability that comes with issuing payments yourself and giving people access to your bank accounts and check stock.
OTTIMATE: How much manual work was a customer typically doing prior to using Ottimate that maybe now they’ve automated since deploying the product?
JOE: Sometimes it’s really hard to quantify the time savings in terms of man hours because not every company is built equally. I’m really good at doing data entry and a lot of my peers in the AP space are too, but that doesn’t mean everybody is. Certain people are slower than others.
Some clients tell me that they receive an invoice that has to go through their grocery operation on Monday and they don’t get it entered into their spreadsheet until Friday. Then Friday comes around and they ship all of that week’s invoices to the corporate office. On Monday, they have to go through all those invoices and by the time they enter them into the ERP software, it’s Wednesday. So a week and a half has gone by since they received the invoice.
Whereas with Ottimate, if they entered it on the day it was received, by Wednesday someone in the corporate office would have reviewed and entered that invoice into their ERP software. Ottimate can reduce turnaround time by days. For other processes, it saves multiple hours.
For me, doing and reviewing my AP process took an hour or two on a daily basis. I was able to get it down to 10 or 15 minutes with Ottimate. It’s all about creating efficiencies where you can. All these time savings add up.
OTTIMATE: Something you touched on there is integration with ERP systems. Can you tell me more about that?
JOE: The vision I paint for our clients is that you can use Ottimate for all of your AP dirty work. And then this makes your ERP a clean, pristine, and sanitary environment. Because before Ottimate, you have a lot of different team members who have access to your accounting software. They can go in, make or request changes, and ask to update certain GL accounts on a particular invoice because they want to make the books look good or something came in late.
With our connections to ERP systems, now you do all that work in Ottimate. Once we send it to the ERP, everything’s been done. All that work that you were doing in your ERP before is being done in Ottimate and that’s where everybody’s working. The API connections we offer with QuickBooks, Sage Intacct, NetSuite, and Acumatica enable us to send that information directly to those ERPs instantaneously with the invoice image attached. If you were uploading those images manually before, now we’re saving you time on that end as well.
ERP vendors usually charge you by the user and Ottimate doesn’t. Maybe today someone with Sage Intacct has 50 users and has to pay for each one of those licenses. But once they bring Ottimate into the fold, maybe they reduce your Intacct licenses by 25 or 50 percent. That’s going to save money and allow more team members to access the environment so they can get their work done. It provides a lot of efficiency by connecting to the ERP system in an easy way.
OTTIMATE: How often does Ottimate replace a similar tool versus it being a customer’s first experience using a product like this?
JOE: Many people in AP adapt to technology. They want to have the latest and greatest. They might have been using BILL or another AP automation tool previously, and they realized they’re now outgrowing it and need more functionality, adaptability, and customization. We’re happy to support those clients. Others are comfortable with the way they’ve been doing things but now need to add additional team members or do something different to scale up. Ottimate helps them too.
By introducing them to AP automation, we’re giving them a tool that can help them achieve their goals without increasing headcount and providing something that’s really intuitive, so it doesn’t feel like they have to learn a whole new piece of software. You understand what you’re doing when you’re using Ottimate.
OTTIMATE: If somebody switches to Ottimate, what are some systems they might have used previously, and why might they have decided to make a change?
JOE: BILL (previously Bill.com) and some of our other competitors often don’t give them the robust approval functions they want. In other software, everything is going to the CFO or nothing is. With Ottimate, you can stack approval policies to build complex workflows within your organization. Maybe 90% of your invoices don’t need to go to the CFO, but sometimes they do. You can tell our software what those conditions are and automate them.
We have a statement reconciliation tool that allows our users to reconcile statements automatically. No other AP automation tool is offering that today. With our spend management product, you can have virtual and physical credit cards, automatically track those transactions, and facilitate employee reimbursements. It’s a full suite of AP automation, while competitors are more narrowly focused.
OTTIMATE: How long do people typically look for a solution before they find Ottimate?
JOE: It depends on the size of the organization. I use the analogy of a train. A large steam engine takes a while to get going, but then it’s moving. At a big organization where there are a lot of people involved, this initiative might take six months to a year. But if you’re a smaller or midsize organization, you might only be searching for two or three months or less.
Want to see how Ottimate can solve your company’s AP pain points? Schedule a demo today.
And check back soon for the next installment in this article series!