BPM for Financial Operations: Purchase-to-Pay

Automating the matching of purchase orders, goods receipts, and invoices is a great way to eliminate manual exceptions and optimize your cash flow. But some exceptions will always occur so you need a way to have insight into all of your payables. When you have a complete view, you’ll be able to take advantage of opportunities such as pre-payment discounts.

A purchase-to-pay system needs two main components – the ability to auto match documents and structured workflow to facilitate resolution of items that can’t be matched. If you’re like many companies, you don’t have a “system” for auto matching. You may have some matching actions you take, but they are all likely extractions from different databases manually pulled together. Any exceptions that fall out of auto match gets handled manually and tracked with a spreadsheet that’s unfortunately always out of date.

You can buy specialty software programs to help manage the purchase-to-pay process, but those won’t help with the myriad of other exceptions in other finance process such as "order-to-cash", and "record-to-report". There are specialized software applications for those too, licensing a number of different single-purpose applications leads you into the challenging land of "application sprawl".

There is a better way. Appian’s Business Process Management (BPM) platform can easily be implemented – by your business users, without writing code – to create solutions for purchase-to-pay processes tailored to your specific business needs. Integration with your ERP and other systems is a snap. Build applications for all the processes in the purchase-to-pay arena such as purchase order management, capital expenditure requests, and accounts payable reconciliation and more with ease. You’ll be doing it with one application package. That’s only one screen for your users to log into (or better yet, use our new social and mobile interfaces). No longer will you have to wait for an independent software vendor making purchase-to-pay applications to put your change requests on their official roadmap. See a need to tweak your application? Simply open up the visual process modeler and implement it to go live immediately.

Want to learn more? See the customer examples below or fill out the form to speak to someone from Appian.