Five Big Pain Points and How Members Plan to Address Them

The editors of Managing Accounts Payable asked IOFM Members if, looking back over the past year, they noted any particular concerns or issues that they would like to tackle in the new year. Four AP professionals present their pain points and offer their perspectives in the following member exchange.

1. Paying Vendors with no current W-9 or certificate of insurance (COI) on file. "One issue that my company ran into in 2013 was maintaining W-9s and certificates of insurance (COIs) for the vendors," reveals Mandy Avgeris, Sr. AP Administrator at a major automotive company. "The company was paying the vendors with no current W-9 or COI on file. Also, after a quick audit, the company discovered that some of the vendors were invoicing incorrectly with terms." 

"Part of my role in 2014 will be auditing the vendor files as well as auditing our individual admins for errors prior to our internal and external auditors auditing our department as a whole,” she says. “I will also be tasked with looking for ways to prevent fraud within our department (not that the company has had any—they just want to be proactive). In addition, I will be looking into auditing our T&E files as well." 

2. Importing data after an acquisition. "As a large company that is growing very quickly, there have been a number of acquisitions," says Avgeris. "Our challenge for 2014 is to find a way to import our new acquisition stores’ vendor list into our system with ease, and, in the process, determine how to import only their active vendors. Up until now, we have to load all of their vendors into our system, whether they are current or not. That results in AP having to (1) weed out the inactive vendors; and (2) compare that vendor list with our current vendor list and try to combine the accounts. It seems like a lot of unnecessary steps with this process. So, moving into 2014, these are just a few of the projects that we will tackle that stem from issues in 2013." 

3. Onboarding vendors to EDI810s. Kelly A. Coxon, APM, Director, Procure to Pay at University of Pittsburg Medical Center (UPMC) reports that her biggest AP pain point is onboarding vendors to EDI810s. 

"Many vendors are not EDI810 capable," she explains. "To attack this issue, we developed a PO Flip solution with our exchange provider and will push vendors who are not sending EDI810s to flip their POs into invoices. Approximately 55 percent of our 85,000 transactions a month are sent via EDI810 today. Requiring our vendors to flip POs into invoices will enable us to continue to migrate away from paper invoices and greatly increase our true electronic invoices in 2014." 

4. Centralizing AP services. "We centralized all of our AP departments to our corporate office," reveals Michelle Lynch, APS, BancTec Administrator at Christus Health. "This consisted of 12 regions with approximately 50 locations. It involved hiring and training all new AP associates and boxing up and relocating all the AP documents. 

"In addition to centralizing our AP department, we have started the process of automating the department," she says. "We are currently working with BancTec to create users, roles, and flows— integrating data and training end-users at the multiple locations. We’ve gone live with our LTACH and Home Care sites but the real test will be in early 2014 when we go live with our other 35 to 40 locations." 

"Our department has had many ups and downs but has pulled together and come out a stronger team," says Lynch. "While we still have a lot of work ahead of us we are determined to make our AP department the best." 

5. Setting up processes after affiliating with other companies. "We formed an affiliation with a local Medical Center and went from one company to multiple companies," says Kathy Nystrom, APM, AP Application Analyst at Central Washington Hospital/Confluence Health. "Forming the affiliation required setting up, testing, changing processes, and also transferring data into these new companies. It will be an ongoing process, with the moving of the Medical Center onto our software February 1, 2014." 

"The transition has not been smooth, yet our AP team has risen to the challenge," reports Nystrom, "Although some of our automated processes have temporarily changed to manual and created more work with the same amount of employees, the staffers have learned a lot and are evaluating all processes. The goal for 2014 is to automate, become more lean and current in all areas of AP, and to become the best AP department we can be for our company." 

Editor's Note: What are your pain points and challenges? If you would like to share your experiences with other AP professionals, e-mail editor Elaine Stattler at [email protected]