Friday 29th January, 2015

We might be about to head into February, but most of us can still just about remember those resolutions we made in the warm afterglow of New Year, even if we haven’t quite kept to them. Perhaps high on your list was a new resolve to do things differently, be more effective, join a gym – change jobs! And if the latest research from Robert Half is anything to go by, you’re not alone. Retaining top talent is going to be a major problem for CFOs and FDs this year.

And that shouldn’t come as a surprise. Although the economy’s juddered from recession, to slow growth, to nervous uncertainty - there’s never been a better time to be working across purchase to pay.

A few years ago, anyone working in AP might have had a reasonably clear idea of their career trajectory, and to be honest it probably wasn’t an especially exciting view. Not so anymore. With the growth and capacity of enabling technology, those working in AP now have more control and visibility of the data at their fingertips.

There’s only ever going to be so much information possible to be gained from manual processing, especially for someone in AP. Once a piece of paper leaves your hands, it’s no longer yours, where it goes from there and why is mostly irrelevant – your job is done.

But these days, it’s not over-egging it to say that technology and better processes have driven a revolution across purchase to pay. Each electronic transaction leaves a trail; tells a story. And whether you’re an AP Manager, Procurement leader, in Treasury or someone responsible for that whole area, it’s one that you can listen to, have the ability to interpret, the power to direct and the control to predict the outcome.

Cash might still be king, but it’s the data that fuels the engine of the P2P department and is what sits behind an organisation’s strategy and decisions around risk and spend. So if you’re someone with analytical ability, the tools and positions are now available for you to feed that ability, regardless of where you start your career.

And because increasingly it is “a department” ie, not separate, barely connected functions whirring away independently, there’s more room for growth than ever before. In some cases that’s been driven directly by the appointment of someone in the relatively new role of Head of P2P, or depending on the reporting structure of the organisation, by the Global Process Owner.

So if you ended last year feeling you had more to give and more to learn – the chances are you’re already in the process of reinventing your existing position, or actively looking elsewhere. And if you are, the explosion of P2P technology, combined with the growth and depth of the new roles available, means you’ll have an exciting year ahead whatever you do. And who knows, this time next year you could even have found the time to cross the theshold of that gym...!