Hello,
We’re looking into moving away from our paper AP approval process. For those of you currently using the ECM AP invoice approval workflow (or whatever the latest acronym is):
How well does it work in practice?
What functionality do you find most useful?
What limitations or frustrations have you run into?
Any feedback, lessons learned, or best practices would be appreciated as we evaluate whether to implement it.
Thanks!
We use it, and love it. Saves huge amount of time.
IDC - freakishly accurate in reading Invoices once it’s trained. Removed almost 100% of the need to do any manual data entry to get invoices created.
ECM Workflow - base workflow works, but you’ll end up modifying it for your process - but it works great.
Having said that, let me explain how we framed the whole process. We created a receiving workflow to get the packing slips into ECM and attached to the Receipt transaction. That then allows the use of ‘related documents’ inside ECM and it will show the packing slip when viewing an invoice - based on Vendor/PO numbers. This allows for paperless 3-way matching. then we built an Exchange Mailbox for ALL AP invoices, no matter who or how they were received, they go to the mailbox. This allows AP folks to manage all related communications via email and ‘move’ invoices that they are ready to process into a subfolder, which is then consumed by IDC.
Once into the workflow, we have a few stops and approval points to allow for adjustments before it gets to Kinetic, but once they make it there, nothing has to be changed and the group just needs to be posted.
We are huge proponents of the process and are rolling it out to our other companies after the next release. I’d be happy to discuss it/demo it with your team if that would help.
Having implemented this solution a number of times for different customers, I’d say @MikeGross’s experience is a shared one. The approval functionality is arguably one of the bigger selling points to the AP Automation license.
How well does it work in practice?
The short answer is it works great! There are many ways that it can be implemented and even the possibility to automate the entire process assuming consistent datapoints exist to do so.
What functionality do you find most useful?
I think the biggest benefit for AP teams is that they no longer need to chase approvers to sign off on documents as ECM can send reminders to approvers to do so. This makes the approval process virtually hands-off for AP teams as ECM does that work for them. From an approver perspective, being able to review and approve the invoice all via email is a huge advantage and time saver. This speeds up the payment process which in turn keeps vendors happy.
What limitations or frustrations have you run into?
Once the approval process is in place I have not heard many frustrations with its design. Some of the limitations and frustrations from the development side come from the workflow task for mobile approvals not being as versatile as you’d expect it to be, especially for such a desired functionality.
@MikeGross Excellent perspective, thanks for sharing!
I know @MikeGross has spoke on this topic as a customer who uses it many times at Insights. When I was new to AP Automation, he helped me understand quite a bit about it.