A healthy relationship with suppliers and vendors is a crucial component for business. To maintain a healthy relationship, they need to be paid regularly and on time. While most businesses understand this and strive hard to achieve it, often businesses get delayed in making payments or miss payments altogether.
Manual Processes Result in Late Payments and Strained Vendor Relationships
For smooth operations of vendor payments, the accounts payable (AP) department follows various validation and approval workflows before paying a vendor invoice. Typically, the vendor payment is not made unless the invoice goes through the all the levels of AP validations and approvals, causing delay and sometimes even inaccuracy. Vendors send invoice statements to the AP department to know the status of their pending invoice payments, which sometimes becomes an endless email trail and become very hard to trace.
These problems become even more time-consuming and complex when the process is manual. The AP department spends a lot of time to just reconcile the vendor invoices and follow up with vendors. It is a tedious process that needs to be repeated for different vendors. For some businesses, seasonal business volume can add additional pressure on the AP department for vendor statement reconciliations. While some AP departments use automation for reconciliations, they are still required to do many manual tasks like following up with vendors, downloading statements from emails, pre-processing the invoice data, uploading and downloading files from ERP, etc.
Avoid Late Payments with HighIQ’s Intelligent Automation Solution
HighIQ solved this problem by creating a Vendor Statement Reconciliation IQ worker combined with HighIQ’s proprietary algorithms and Robotic Process Automation (RPA), provided by Automation Anywhere. Think of this IQ Worker as your intelligent digital assistant, which enables the automation of tasks required to perform vendor statement reconciliations. The IQ Worker can extract information from the vendor statements and automatically perform reconciliations by fetching data simultaneously from two or three (or more if required) databases. It can also be seamlessly integrated into an existing ERP system making the downstream delivery of information quick and easy. This is turn results in timely vendor payments, better market reputation, and healthier relationships with vendors and suppliers.
Some of the main functions of the IQ Worker are:
1. Connect to the mail server and download vendor statements.
2. Convert them into a standardized format.
3. Fetch relevant data from different databases or files to perform reconciliations.
4. Perform reconciliations between all the information available from the different databases and the vendor statement.
5. Archive and/or backup the files used in the workflow.
6. Reply to the vendor or business stakeholders with the results of vendor reconciliations.
1. Easily customizable and configurable.
2. Creation of audit trails for every step and every run.
3. Archive and/or backup of the work files with customizable settings.
4. Customized keywords to create standard vendor statement formats.
5. Reporting of additional information, for example, the status of vendor payments.
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Engineer-RPA/COE
Sachin is an established RPA developer with over 7 years of experience in IT, manufacturing, and construction industries. He’s been working with HighIQ over the last one year. Before that, he was part of the SAP implementation team with one of India’s biggest construction companies, Dilip Buildcon Limited, and the logistics team at Bridgestone, a popular tyre company. Sachin played a key role in the solution design and development of the Vendor Statement Reconciliations IQ Worker.