Where you see the abbreviations AR and AP software in a business setting, you know those probably stand for accounts receivable and accounts payable.
If you run a decent-sized business or even a tiny one, you probably already realize how critical these areas are.
If you can’t depend on your accounts payable and receivable departments to do their jobs correctly, you’re going to run into serious issues sooner rather than later.
You can get yourself a modern software suite that has features that can help you in this area. If you do so, let’s look at some of the most critical tasks that you’ll want it to perform.
It Should Be Able to Archive All Your Data
If you’re looking at AP and AR solutions, you’ll first want to make sure that the suite in question can archive all the data from your current and former customer and vendor interactions. You might have a business that takes part in hundreds or thousands of interactions every day. Money changes hands with each one, either going out from your company or coming into it.
You must keep careful track of all of those interactions for tax purposes later. The IRS will come knocking at your door if you fail to do so.
Aside from that, you need to have permanent records of all monetary interactions because you never know when a vendor might try to claim that you never paid them for something. They probably won’t do that because they’re trying to trick you. They might simply misplace the relevant paperwork.
If you can easily go to your archive and pull up all vendor interactions, you can know for sure whether their claim is valid. If you made a mistake or overlooked something, you can quickly correct it. If the vendor or customer is wrong, you can prove that definitively.
It Should Streamline Your Workflows
The best company is one where the accounts payable and receivable are both humming along at all times. The departments are constantly accepting and processing the money coming in, and they’re paying vendors quickly to maintain strong, healthy business relationships.
If you have to use several different overlapping systems in this area, that will complicate things very quickly. That’s why you want to engage a company and purchase or rent a software suite that can handle all of these interactions in the same place.
A single, streamlined system will always be better than several different ones that have similar functionality. You’ll probably have to pay for each one of them, which is wasteful, and they might not even interact with each other all that well.
It Should Have Excellent Security Protocols
Your accounts payable and receivable will feature lots of sensitive data that you never want anyone besides your qualified workers, the customer, or the vendor to peruse. You never want to see a hacker getting into your system and poking around. They can learn all kinds of trade secrets, and they might also try some fraudulent behavior, such as assuming a client’s identity.
If you don’t have the proper security measures in place, these things can happen, and when they do, it makes your clients and vendors trust you less. Until you fix the problem, they won’t want to have anything further to do with you. That’s why you need to check out what security measures your AP and AR software suite has before you implement it for your business requirements.
AR & AP Software Should Eliminate Manual Data Entry
You already know how much data you need to keep track of every day. You might also still have a system in place where your workers need to enter the data manually.
They’re not going to like that very much. It’s time-consuming, but more so than that, it’s boring. It’s also no longer necessary.
The software suites you can purchase or rent now can help you eliminate all manual data entry. Once you do this, it allows your workers to focus on other things. Imagine how much more their productivity will increase when they’re not entering data all day long.
Should Quickly Locate Any Errors
One final thing your AR and AP software suite should do is locate any errors and bring them to your attention. If it notices that a vendor’s order never showed up or you never delivered something to a client, it can tell you about that, and you can swiftly investigate.