Unlocking Efficiency: How Ottimate Empowers Finance Leaders through AP Technology
by The Ottimate Editorial Team
Creating efficiencies and finding ways to cut costs are essential when growing a company. One key strategy is to identify and eliminate repetitive, mundane tasks that consume valuable time and resources. By leveraging automation and technology in the workplace, businesses can streamline processes, reduce errors, and free up their teams to focus on high-value activities.
Let’s dive deeper into how creating efficiencies with technology can help save time and money, specifically in the realm of finance and accounting.
Why Utilizing Automation Technology is Important for Your Business
Harnessing the power of technology can significantly reduce human error and enhance accuracy across your finances. By automating repetitive tasks, you not only save time but also enable your team to concentrate on what truly matters: strategic initiatives that drive growth and profitability.
Here are some tasks that you can automate with technology:
- Invoice processing: Automating invoice processing can speed up payments, improve cash flow forecasting, and reduce manual data entry.
- Payments: Automating payments can create a painless experience that ensures employees and bills are paid accurately and on time, while reducing manual data entry.
- Expense management: Automating expense reports and receipt collection can eliminate the need to chase down employees for receipts.
- Reporting: Automating month-end reporting can save time and ensure reports are generated accurately and consistently.
When it comes to your accounts payable (AP) process, automation can be the key to streamlining success. Automated systems help maintain compliance in financial transactions, simplify audits, and mitigate the risk of fraud in the workspace.
Tasks You Can Automate with Technology
Streamline Your Financial Operations
One powerful way to streamline your financial operations is by linking and utilizing invoice, payment, and spend management technology that seamlessly syncs with your ERP system. This integration automatically creates an audit trail for your invoices and expenses, ensuring compliance and providing real-time visibility into cash flow — helping you make informed, data-driven decisions
Ottimate’s Instant Capture feature exemplifies the benefits of automation. A small slip-up, such as entering $1,000 instead of $100, could have a significant impact on your bottom line. Instant Capture ensures accuracy by digitizing, coding, and organizing your invoices in seconds. By simply uploading invoices, you eliminate the potential for manual data entry errors.
Ottimate’s Instant Capture
digitizes, codes, and organizes your invoices in seconds, giving you time back in your day that would have been spent on tedious manual data entry.
Furthermore, Ottimate allows you to set up customized workflow and approval policies, eliminating bottlenecks and ensuring timely vendor payments. This not only strengthens your relationships with suppliers but also helps avoid late fees and reputational damage.
Approvals are another crucial aspect of accounts payable automation, as they ensure that invoices are reviewed and validated before being processed for payment. Ottimate recognizes the importance of customized approval workflows and offers flexible options to tailor the approval process to your organization’s unique needs.
With Ottimate, you can set up multi-level approvals based on factors like invoice amount, vendor, or department. This ensures that the right stakeholders review and approve invoices at each stage, preventing unauthorized or erroneous payments. Approval thresholds can be customized to align with your organization’s policies and risk tolerance.
Ottimate streamlines the approval process by automatically routing invoices to the appropriate approvers based on predefined rules. Approvers receive notifications and can review and approve invoices directly within the system, eliminating the need for manual follow-ups and reducing approval cycle times.
Nivea Hospitality’s Success with Ottimate
“We didn’t really have an approvals process before Ottimate. We just knew that if someone emailed an invoice to us, then a GM had obviously approved it and whoever entered it had looked at it. But now we have just that one extra person looking at them and making sure that everything’s good. So that is good to have!”
— Vanessa Troyer, CFO at Nivea Hospitality
In addition to invoice approvals, Ottimate also offers customized payment approval workflows. This adds an extra layer of control and security to the payment process. Payment approvals can be configured based on factors like payment method, amount, or vendor, ensuring that outgoing payments are thoroughly reviewed and authorized.
By implementing a robust and customized approval process, organizations can:
- Prevent unauthorized or fraudulent payments
- Ensure compliance with internal policies and external regulations
- Improve visibility and control over invoice and payment workflows
- Strengthen vendor relationships by ensuring timely and accurate payments
- Avoid late fees and reputational damage caused by delayed or missed payments
Ottimate’s customized approval workflows for both invoices and payments provide organizations with the control, visibility, and flexibility needed to streamline their accounts payable processes while mitigating risks and ensuring compliance. By tailoring the approval process to your specific requirements, your company can optimize your AP workflows, strengthen vendor relationships, and achieve greater financial efficiency.
And when tax season arrives, having all your invoices and payments tracked and synced with your ERP system saves countless hours of manual reconciliation. Ottimate’s integration capabilities make this process seamless, allowing you to focus on strategic tax planning rather than slogging through hours of manual data entry.
Your Return on Investment (ROI) in Technology
Investing in technology delivers tangible returns for your business. On average, companies spend around $15 per invoice due to costs associated with manual data input, check mailing, and other processing expenses. By automating these tasks with an AI-powered solution like Ottimate, you not only redirect valuable time to revenue-generating activities but also save money by reducing overhead costs.
Investing in technology delivers tangible returns for your business. On average, companies spend around $15 per invoice due to costs associated with manual data input, check mailing, and other processing expenses. By automating these tasks with an AI-powered solution like Ottimate, you not only redirect valuable time to revenue-generating activities but also save money by reducing overhead costs.
Companies spend around $15
on average per invoice due to costs associated with manual data input, check mailing, and other processing expenses. Ottimate helps reduce these costs significantly.
Moreover, Ottimate helps you foster better relationships with your vendors. With timely invoice approvals and the flexibility to pay using their preferred methods — whether it’s overnight checks or fast ACH — you demonstrate your commitment to your partners.
Ottimate’s easy-to-use vendor portal adds an extra layer of transparency, allowing suppliers to track invoice status and accept payments effortlessly.
Ottimate: Your Partner in Efficiency
In today’s competitive landscape, embracing technology is no longer optional — it’s a necessity. By leveraging End-to-End AP automation tools like Ottimate, finance leaders and accounting teams can unlock efficiencies, save time and money, and focus on driving strategic growth.
Automating invoice processing, streamlining approvals, and integrating with ERP systems are just a few ways Ottimate empowers businesses to thrive. As you navigate the ever-evolving world of finance, consider how implementing the right technology can transform your operations and propel your organization to new heights.
Ready to transform your accounts payable?
Contact Ottimate today to learn more about leveraging artificial intelligence to unlock new levels of efficiency and opportunity. The future of finance is now.
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