Main Menu
Bookmark This Site
2008 Accounts Payable SurveyOver the last 10 years there has been increasing pressure on the Finance function to deliver increased efficiencies with the same or less resources. With this a proliferation of complex financial systems and tools have come onto the market to support these goals and a growing trend to remove paper and manual handling from the financial processes. Much of this focus has been on the Purchase-to-Pay cycle and Accounts Payable department. Unfortunately the majority of these have missed the mark and have just added to the complexity without delivering real value and savings.
FISCAL Technologies sponsored this survey to get first hand feedback from finance professionals that work within Accounts Payable & Treasury, to provide a snapshot of the current real key issues and problems that affect them. With this information solutions and processes can be highlighted for investigation and improvement.
The survey specifically wanted to answer three main questions about Accounts Payable. These were:
This survey had an excellent and enthusiastic response. The participants were from a cross section of industries including public sector, industrial, commercial, retail and banking. Three quarters of participants were senior management, over half of them from organisations with a turnover up to 250m with most processing over 50,000 invoices per annum. All the major ERP/ Accounting systems have been covered. Summary Results• Accounting systems working?Current accounting systems are in the main working effectively. However 46.9% of the sample were dissatisfied with the high cost of adding extra functionality to their AP system. It was seen in many cases as prohibitive, leading finance departments to purchase external best of breed technologies to bolt into current AP/ERP systems. The second major area of concern was the ability to extract key information in a usable and easy to read format. • Accounts Payable problem areas?The top 5 current areas that cause Accounts Payable managers the most problems are:
• Time Spent within Accounts Payable?72.2% of AP managers spent less than 5% of their working month improving their AP system. On average only 12.6% of the sample spent more than 20% of their working month on value based tasks to improve their department. Generally it was felt AP departments were understaffed and could only manage their current workload and not do extra. • New Accounts Payable technologies?Over 50% of the sample would consider an online system for all major AP tasks such as foreign exchange, expenses management and duplicate payment checking. The three key factors for consideration when choosing new technologies were security, ease of use and integration into their AP system. They would prefer to pay for these new applications on an annual recurring basis. • Accounts Payable support?31.3% of all respondents would be interested in joining an official non-profit UK support organisation. 77.3% wanted regular updates on what’s happening with in the payments industry, followed closely by an accreditation scheme for AP professionals and a dedicated website. ConfidentialityThis document contains FISCAL Technologies confidential and proprietary information and is supplied to you purely as part of Smarter Payments E-Report. No part of this publication may be disclosed or transferred outside of your organisation. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means including photography and recording, without the written permission of FISCAL.
|
