How to Automate Accounts Payable for Your Small Business

Incorrectly processed invoices can lead to missed discounts for early payment, potential late fees, strained supplier relationships, and even harm your small business's creditworthiness.
To this problem, there comes a simple solution: automation. Say goodbye to error-prone manual tasks and hello to efficiency, accuracy, and real-time insights that can help your business survive and thrive.

What is Automated Accounts Payable?

Handling purchase orders, supplier invoices, and all the necessary approvals to stay ahead of payments can be tiresome and time-consuming for many small business owners. Traditional methods often involve numerous manual touchpoints, including data entry, invoice matching, and the approvals process - which can lead to long processing times, wasted Sunday nights managing payments, and potentially strained relationships with suppliers if delays occur.

In contrast, automating accounts payable refers to leveraging simple yet innovative software solutions like Thriday to eliminate these manual components - streamlining and managing the business process that involves handling bills and supplier invoices. Automating these processes can ensure your business is making prompt payments, maintaining good supplier relationships, and operating more efficiently. Automation ensures the process is seamless and efficient from the moment an invoice is received to the final payment.

Expertly designed to handle various tasks such as capturing invoice data, routing invoices for approval and easily integrated with the rest of your business banking* and accounting for efficient payment execution and reconciliation; Thriday eliminates the financial admin involved in managing your payables, automating and accelerating the entire process while also enhancing accuracy, reducing the potential for human error, and improving the overall efficiency of the financial operations within your business.

Automating Accounts Payable with Thriday

Automating your accounts payable process can transform the way you handle your business finances. Thriday's Bill Manager is at the forefront of this transformation, offering a seamless, secure, and efficient way to manage bills – integrated with the rest of your business banking* and accounting in a streamlined and user-friendly all-in-one financial management system. Here's how Bill Manager can revolutionise your accounts payable:

• Effortless Bill Handling: Thriday provides a unique mailbox to which all your bills can be directed. You can forward your electronic bills to this mailbox or upload them manually. For physical bills, snapping a simple photo is all it takes, and Thriday's system handles the rest.
• Intelligent Data Capture: Thriday scans and extracts crucial payment details from your bills, identifying amounts, due dates, and GST to ensure accurate and timely payments. The system can even distinguish different payment methods, whether it's direct transfer details or BPAY.
• Tireless Transacting: Once scanned, you can easily review the extracted information and make the payment from any of your integrated Thriday business bank accounts*.
• Fraud Prevention and Error Reduction: Seamless integration with your banking* allows your bills to be matched to approved payees in your account using AI, significantly reducing the risk of invoice fraud and costly mistakes.
• Flexible Payment Scheduling: Thriday allows you to adjust payment schedules if you prefer not to pay on the default date and alerts you if there are insufficient funds, helping you manage your cash flow more effectively.

This feature is just a small part of Thriday's commitment to reducing the time business owners spend on financial admin, transforming a time-consuming task that typically takes up to 45 minutes into a process that's completed in just a few minutes. 

With Bill Manager, Thriday customers can enjoy Australia's first end-to-end automated accounts payable solution—no manual entry, no ABA files, and no toggling between tabs to find the right information. It's all about efficiency, accuracy, and peace of mind for small business owners - freeing up time to focus on what matters most.

Reclaim your time with Thriday today!

Five Benefits of Automating Accounts Payable

When managing the outflow of funds in a small business, automating accounts payable can be a real game-changer. Here are five compelling reasons why your clients should consider making the switch:

1. Minimise Mistakes

Manual invoice processing is a breeding ground for errors. A simple typo can lead to overpayments, underpayments, and entirely avoidable headaches. Automated systems sidestep these issues by extracting data from e-invoices directly. 

Thriday's Bill Manager feature takes the hassle out of manual data entry by scanning and capturing invoice details, reducing the risk of human error and ensuring your payments are always on the nose. Even paper invoices aren't a problem—snap a pic with your smartphone, and the system will decipher the details, ensuring payments are accurate to the penny. 

2. Simplify the Payment Process

With automation, invoices are put through a simple predefined workflow from receipt to settlement. Thriday uses AI to align invoices with payments and present them for swift and secure review and approval - allowing you to give the thumbs up from anywhere, anytime, from your mobile device or the web app. Plus, every invoice and corresponding payment is logged, creating a clear audit trail that answers any "who and when" questions without the paper chase.

3. Seize Early Payment Perks

Nearly half of all businesses miss out on early payment discounts, but it doesn't have to be that way. An automated system doesn't just keep an eye on these discounts—it actively chases them. This not only saves a tidy sum but also strengthens supplier relationships through reliable, on-time payments. 

With easy payment scheduling, Thriday's system can help you to stay ahead and take advantage of such discounts, allowing you to capitalise on savings and build a reputation for financial punctuality.

4. Enhance Security and Assurance

Digital payments are the Fort Knox of financial transactions. They're secure, traceable, and neatly compiled on a dashboard for easy monitoring. This digital fortress is a critical defence against fraud and the mishaps of manual processes. Lost invoices? Misplaced payments? With innovative digital accounting software like Thriday, these are worries of the past. And if a vendor ever questions a payment, the answer is just a few clicks away. 

Our secure platform takes this a step further by ensuring that all transactions are not only secure but also integrated within your financial management system - combating fraud and human error by using AI to match your bills to existing payees in your Thriday account and obtaining your approval before payment.

5. Gain Real-Time Financial Health Insights

Disconnected payments and invoices can be extremely tedious to manually aggregate to get a complete picture of your business's financial health. But when invoices, bills and payments are automatically synchronised with both your banking and accounting software, it's like putting on financial glasses—everything becomes clear. With Thriday's automated accounting, your real-time transactions are all seamlessly integrated and reconciled into continuously updated key financial reports such as income and cash flow statements, tax forecasts, estimates and more to let you track spending, balance the books, and spot potential cash flow hiccups before they turn into full-blown headaches. Comprehensive financial reporting done for you automatically without lifting a finger creates an opportunity to shine—transforming raw data into actionable insights about your business's health. 

Leverage up-to-the-minute insights into all the key financial components of your small business so you can make informed decisions quickly and confidently, ensuring your business stays agile and ahead of the curve.

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Key Takeaways: The Thriday Revolution in Accounts Payable Automation

In the fast-paced world of small business, time is a currency just as valuable as cash and automating accounts payable is a strategic move to optimise both. Embrace innovation with Thriday to enhance efficiency, accuracy, and security in your financial operations and leave the days of manual data entry, endless paper trails, and the Sunday night invoice shuffle behind you.

Thriday's all-in-one financial management platform is a business partner that works tirelessly in the background, ensuring that your financial admin tasks are handled with precision and ease. From automated bookkeeping and accounting to real-time financial reporting, Thriday offers a comprehensive suite of features to empower small business owners to take their financial management to the next level while also reclaiming their time.

Step into the future of financial management with Thriday —where every day is geared towards helping you thrive.