Enterprises have witnessed the transformative benefits of automation with its deployment across multiple business processes, including automating invoice processing Accounts Payable (AP). However, the whole context of automation changed with the introduction of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Efficient management of accounts payable and management is vital for a business as it allows an organization to handle its finances effectively. When AP departments run smoothly and efficiently, invoices are paid on time, and organizations establish trust and a positive reputation among suppliers and partners for prompt payments.
Interactions with vendors can be very complicated for enterprises. It is tedious, time-consuming, expensive, and sometimes frustrating to respond to supplier inquiries. It is equally frustrating if not more for suppliers to find the status of payments on their invoices. Although these interactions are necessary, enterprises are on the lookout for more accessible and better ways to improve communications with suppliers and buyer-supplier relationships. Vendor portals give suppliers and vendors visibility into the AP processing of the invoice and payment status. These portals can also support self-service functionalities for submitting and tracking invoices, updating payment information, downloading detailed remittances without needing assistance from the buyer's AP team, etc.
What is an Accounts Payable Vendor Portal?
Paying vendors is often a complicated process. Invoices must be appropriately submitted, handled, processed, signed off, and payment issued by ACH, wire transfer, or checks, which requires printing and mailing. Often vendors need more visibility throughout this process, with no communication on when payment can be expected. On the other hand, AP teams often need to figure out how long it will take to process and pay the invoices. AP teams may be waiting for authorizations or identifying who to route requests to, or responding to vendor's queries, and ultimately missing out on early payment discounts while taking on a largely manual task load.
A vendor portal is an integrated online application shared by businesses and their vendors. Such applications extend the value of AP automation platforms, enabling AP teams to automate tasks and processes around maintaining the vendor relationship.
While AP automation systems help ensure that invoices are processed automatically and faster, vendor portals reduce the AP team's effort by taking up additional administrative tasks from them. Vendor portals help streamline supplier AR workflows and strengthen these vital relationships by offering greater visibility to suppliers.
Functions of an AP Vendor Portal
The features of a vendor portal will depend on the provider, but the following are some of the key capabilities to deliver value to both your AP team and your vendors.
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Web-based self-service portal: For anytime, anywhere, access to vendors. Available 24X7 and easy to login into and navigate.
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Vendor Onboarding: When a company begins doing business with a new vendor, vendor onboarding through the vendor portal begins. Self-service vendor onboarding starts with submitting contact and terms information and creating an online W-9 form and setting up vendors in the buyer's system of record.
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Invoice Submission: Vendors can log in into the portal and submit their invoices directly to the provider's system of record.
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Invoice Tracking: Vendors can receive real-time information about the status of invoices and payment status. No need to call the AP department to track down this information.
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Ability to update payment details: Update information from time to time, including preferred payment method. Doing this through the portal makes it simple for the vendor and eliminates the need for error-prone manual entry by the buyer's side.
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Real-time alerts and notifications: Vendors are notified in real-time whenever there is a change in the invoice or payment status.
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Insight and analytics: Vendors can easily view important trends and metrics such as days sales outstanding & credits outstanding.
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Downloadable remittance: One-stop platform for all their information. Vendors can download detailed remittance information and optimize their own reconciliation process.
What is Kanverse Accounts Payable Invoice Automation?
AI-powered Kanverse helps enterprises build "Zero-Touch" document processing workflows. It automates the processing, validation, and filing of unstructured, semi-structured, and structured documents. Save costs, reduce cycle time, turbocharge productivity, and boost team morale.
Kanverse Accounts Payable Invoice Automation digitizes document processing for enterprises from ingestion, classification, extraction, and validation to filing. Extract data from a wide gamut of documents with up to 99.5% accuracy using its multi-stage AI engine. Say goodbye to manual entry, reduce average invoice processing time from days to seconds, optimize the average cost of processing an invoice by up to 80%, minimize human error, and turbocharge the productivity of your team. AP automation software like Kanverse APIA (AP Invoice Automation) is built to do the heavy lifting across your AP cost centers while your staff can focus on productive and business-critical activities.
With Kanverse Vendor Portal, we provide our customers with a self-service portal for their vendors. Kanverse Vendor Portal further optimizes the user experience with a consolidated view of all invoice-related information and their payment status.
Schedule a demo with us today to find out more.
About the Author
Kingshuk Ghosh, Principal Product Manager, Kanverse.ai