Improving your Procure to Pay Process

When your procure-to-pay processes (P2P) is efficient, staff and vendors won’t notice. When it’s inefficient, everyone notices! We were approached by a client recently who was facing significant challenges – staff were disgruntled about the existing procure-to-pay process, which involved lots of double-handling lack of clarity around responsibilities, and was taking up too much time impacting the timeliness and accuracy of their financial reporting.

We were more than happy to take on their process and smooth out the wrinkles. If you need to do the same, here’s where we recommend you start:

Understand the problem
Gather the evidence to support this by analysing and agreeing on the current P2P process. Identify where pain points, bottle-necks and double-handling exist. Make sure to engage all parts of the business who are involved in the process. Make people aware of their role in the end to end process.

Improve the visibility
Meet with stakeholders to understand their needs of a P2P process. Early engagement will help with stakeholder buy-in and will set you up for success later down the line. Mapping the existing process can be helpful in understanding the complexity of the existing process and articulating it to others. For this client, we mapped the requisition to PO, invoice to approval, payment date, petty cash, credit card processes and more. It gets very messy, very quickly!

Provide a single source of truth
In disjointed processes, there are often multiple stakeholders recording their data in multiple places independent from one another. Work on a solution that stops this practice and meets everyone’s needs

Agree and prioritise recommendations
What immediate improvements will make peoples’ jobs easier and improve the process. Our client’s process included printing and filing documents and physically transporting them to a storage facility – this was one change that could be made quickly. Digitisation of records is not complex.

Know the value
When it comes time to win over the hearts and minds of project groups or the Executive Team, make sure you can clearly articulate the benefit that the new P2P process will bring to individuals and the business.

With all these steps taken, we were able to work with the client on a solution that automated much of the current process. The new process has improved visibility of the whole process, reduced errors, stopped the copying of invoices within business units thus avoiding delays in approval and payment, improved staff productivity and reduced costs on multiple fronts. We’re very happy with this outcome and so is the client.

Want to talk to us about your procure to pay process or other inefficient processes? We’re always happy to chat. Contact us on votar@votar.com.au.