Three Reasons Supplier Payments Should Be the First Thing Your Organization Changes

As organizations look toward 2017—the challenges, opportunities, and goals—one of the continued mantras echoing from executives to procurement leaders will be “reduce costs, improve supplier relationships, minimize the risk of fraud, and reduce our environmental footprint.”

Did you know that 68% of organizations have ‘reducing overall processing costs’ as a leading goal within their procurement department? This followed by ‘removing paper (52 percent)’, ‘accelerate approval times (46 percent)’, and ‘improve cash management (35 percent)’ point to a fact: Continuing the organizational status quo and making a decision to throw more people at the problem isn’t helping alleviate it.

Improving your company’s payments process is easier than you’d think, able to provide immense value and return on investment, and helping you to lower risk and money spent on paying suppliers.

It’s Easier Than You’d Think

How long does it take to implement a new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system? How many stakeholders have to weigh in on a change management, improvements to workflows, or new software?

In many cases, making a change to your supplier payment strategy can be completed with minimal input from other departments, in much less time, and with much fewer headaches before, during, and after the change to the payments process.

Further, the decision to make the shift to an automated, virtual payments process can be done on a rolling basis, meaning that you can continue to pay suppliers in the way that works best for both sides of the transaction, making the switch to VCNs for some suppliers and paying others by more traditional means.

Nominal Investment Nets Huge Returns

With fewer departments opining on the decision and less downtime and training than nearly any other organizational change, the move to update and automate your supplier payments is a low-cost decision with immense, immediate value brought back to your company:

• Improved Supply Chain Document Compliance
• Reduced Supplier Payment Costs
• Better Cash Management Processes
• Immediate Savings on Paper, Labor, and other Processing Costs
• Improved Supplies Relationships
• Greater Visibility and Control

To learn more about why companies are rethinking their traditional payments strategies and embracing VCNs, read How Using Virtual Card Numbers Reduces the Costs of Doing Business and 5 Ways VCNs Ease Your Cross-Border Payment Pains.

Your Organization is Hemorrhaging Money if It Doesn’t Change

Reliance on paper checks sets an organization anywhere from $3-5 per check in the form of paper, postage, storage labor, and infrastructure, with laggards seeing their processing costs pushing even higher: up to $20 to write a business check.

With reducing costs atop the list of procurement’s goals, the shift to a more controllable, affordable, or less paper-reliant payments process could save your organization hundreds of thousands, if not millions per year. Learn more about just how much your organization can save by checking out our infographic, Transforming AP Through Automation, on Slideshare.