Look at any map, and you’ll see dense populations near water sources. Since the time we learned to settle lands, we became dependent on agriculture. Originally (and even now in some places), water was manually carried back to the home and farmland. To save time and effort, communities were able to build irrigation systems, automating watering of their crops.

To succeed today, organizations must search for opportunities to innovate, automate and stimulate business. As with farming and irrigation, a business depends on the health of numerous departments — procurement, treasury, accounts payable (AP), accounts receivable (AR) — and external relationships. It must actively nurture these relationships if it is to survive and thrive.

But how do you create an automation system that nurtures and sustains your business? With careful planning for implementation, stakeholder buy-in, and customization to fit the needs for a positive-sum impact, you can create an environment where companies, customers and suppliers can grow value together.

Tending your financial garden: why careful planning and buy-in are essential for accounting automation

Payment processes started as handwritten invoices that were delivered on foot. Today, you can rethink your AR/AP processes, automate transactions with the right software, establish an implementation plan, and coordinate stakeholders' buy-in.

When building out irrigation canals, community members were highly invested and motivated to ensure a successful project and produce a reliable harvest. For invoice automation to succeed, you need buy-in from business leaders, department teams and suppliers to ensure that everyone is on the same page.

Watering your workflow: customize your processes for optimal growth

Farmers customized their irrigation systems to suit their local climate, culture and available resources. The result? Bigger, more reliable harvests. Similarly, businesses can tailor AR/AP automation software to their specific needs and processes based on factors like industry, size and complexity.

For many businesses, manual payment processing is still a painful reality, making payments to vendors and suppliers costly, inefficient and susceptible to fraud. Furthermore, paper-based procure-to-pay (P2P) and order-to-cash (O2C) processes take valuable time and resources that might otherwise go to more strategic tasks that improve the bottom line.

If day-to-day accounting pains still plague your business, it’s time to upgrade to a more automated accounting solution. Unfortunately, in B2B transactions, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to making (or receiving) payments. Your company has and must address its unique technical challenges and objectives, as well as the inefficiencies and costs they imply.

Efficient payments and receipts are just the beginning of the benefits

Beyond watering crops to sustain the immediate family, automated irrigation allows farms to produce crop surpluses. In turn, neighboring communities can access fresh produce they would not otherwise have reliable access to food provides communities with opportunities to expand and develop new partnerships.

In the same way, accounting automation does more than provide reliable ways to “send and pay the bills.” It can streamline a wide array of business processes to provide the following:

• Speed and availability: Receiving payment faster means a lower DSO and more working capital to fund growth.
• Payment efficiency: Embedded payment capabilities offer a streamlined process, saving time and reducing errors caused by juggling data across multiple systems.
• Security: Outsourcing payment operations can help mitigate the risks of fraud, as it is a regulated function where non-compliance can be costly.
• Global compatibility and competitiveness: Customers and suppliers gain the convenience of global compatibility, allowing them to remain a customer/supplier of choice.

The positive-sum impact of AR/AP automation

With a surplus of crops and stronger partnerships, farmers found ways to expand their distribution networks and reach new markets. Corporations, too, now face ever-increasing pressure to control costs, act faster and provide deeper analytics to do the same.

As financial management becomes ever more critical due to rising interest rates and other economic risks, corporations will need automation tools that enable treasury, procurement, AP, AR and other departments to collaborate.

Enjoy positive-sum growth by creating an environment where companies, customers and suppliers create value together. For suppliers, prompt payment from buyers results in predictable cashflow. For buyers themselves, prompt payment helps maintains their "preferred" relationship status, as onboarding new suppliers can be costly and risky. By automating payments end-to-end, you can optimize and harmonize both sides of the cashflow coin and start reaping the harvest of an AI-driven automation system.