Raising the Profile of AP: Tips and Techniques

In this podcast, IOFM Managing Editor Royce Grayson Morse talks to Candace Jaramillo, certified P2P manager at Liberty Oilfield Services and brain-based coach. Jaramillo advises that the first step to creating positivity about AP within an organization is to simply listen — to employees and upper management alike.

While taking on her current role, she did just that — and one of the first things she heard was that her accounting executive was losing sleep over problems with the money going out the door. At that point, Jaramillo took the time to sit down individually with each member of her team in order to get a feel for what their problems were. One of her most important discoveries was that people were doing things inconsistently because they had all been trained by different people. Documenting the organization’s processes was the first step toward addressing those disconnects.

Jaramillo was also pleased to realize that rather than her team being resistant to change, they were eager for it due to a sense of powerlessness under a previous manager. Trusting and engaging them created an atmosphere of inclusion that helped the team move from feeling undervalued to being real contributors to the organization.

For more insights on elevating the profile of AP within your organization, tune into the full podcast.

Candace Jaramillo
P2P Manager, Liberty Oilfield Services

Candace has over 30 years of AP experience and over 15 in supervisory roles. She is a certified P2P manager, and a certified brain-based coach. Her passion is leadership and process improvement within AP.

Royce Grayson Morse

Royce Grayson Morse has been working with IOFM for the past eight years, writing and editing content about Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, automation, and industry trends. She has worked on the IOFM Certification Guides and written the associated examinations; edits the annual 1099 and 1042 Master Guides; conducts podcasts; and manages the IOFM.com website content.

Transcription

Grace Chlosta: Welcome to the IOFM podcast. This is a podcast for accounts payable and accounts receivable professionals who want to stay in the know with current AP and AR trends and ideas. We'll be interviewing professionals in this space on a wide variety of subjects, including automation, artificial intelligence, career growth, compliance, leadership, and much more.

Today we'll be interviewing Candace Jaramillo. Candace has over 30 years of AP experience and over 15 in supervisory roles. She's a certified P2P Manager and a certified Brain-Based Coach. Her passion is leadership and process improvement within AP. Candace will be interviewed by Royce Grayson Morse, Managing Editor at IOFM.

00:00:51

Royce Grayson Morse has been working with IOFM for the past eight years, writing and editing content about accounts payable, accounts receivable, automation, and industry trends. She has worked on the IOFM Certification Guides and written the associated examinations, edits the Annual 1099 and 1042 Master Guides, conducts podcasts, and manages the IOFM.com website content. 

Royce Morse: Hi, Candace, and welcome.

Candace Jaramillo: Hi, Royce. Thank you. 

Royce Morse: Yeah, looking forward to our conversation. Today, I was hoping that we could talk a little bit about how to gain more visibility for accounts payable in an organization, and the steps that you follow to do that. Tell me a little bit about your experience in that area.

Candace Jaramillo: Yeah, Royce, I'd be happy to share. I think this is a hot-button topic that always comes up in AP, so I'll kind of walk you through some of the steps I've taken in past jobs and used my current job to kind of talk through some experiences that I've had to give some kind of real-life examples for how to navigate this.

00:02:09

So in my current job, which I've been in, I guess now, for about a year and a half, I was brought in – basically was told before I was hired that AP had gone through some growing pains. They had kind of exploded overnight and things were basically out of control, and I was brought in to fix those things. 

I know this isn't always necessarily everybody's starting point, but I think, regardless of the starting point, step one needs to always be to step back and listen. What are other people saying about AP? What are the concerns that you hear? 

00:02:50

Obviously, for me, it was – in this particular job, it was very much in my face. It was pretty obvious. It was like, "We've got issues. We don't have good processes. We've had lots of mistakes that have been made that were some very risky mistakes." At one point, my CAO even said to me, "Look, I don't sleep overnight over debits or credits. We can journal those. I lose sleep about money that goes out the door." 

I think for step [one] just kind of listening to what people are saying. What are their concerns? 

Royce Morse: Right. So then I would guess that the next thing you would need to do is kind of understand what was causing those concerns, try to get down to the root causes of that, because you can't fix it if you really don't know what's broken, right?

00:03:48                     

Candace Jaramillo: Exactly, Royce. Once I kind of knew, okay, my chief accounting officer is losing sleep at night because he's worried about money going out the door, then it was time to really sit down with my team. I literally sat with each one of them, one at a time, spent some time with them understanding what they were doing, asking them what questions they had, getting a feel for where were they in their learning process. What did or didn't they know?

As well as just kind of hearing from everybody, what were some of the issues that we had had? Specifics around we paid the wrong vendor, we're managing addresses outside of the system, all of the systems that we were doing manual [sic], so that any time you have a manual process, you're at risk of something going wrong, right? Or any time you make "exceptions" I like to call 'em – when it's a blue moon on a Tuesday, you do this, but if it's a purple moon on a Wednesday, you do that. 

00:04:55

You're just opening your team up to make mistakes. 

Royce Morse: Right. In those conversations, did you discover that different people were doing things differently, or had a different understanding of what their priorities were?

Candace Jaramillo: That's exactly what I discovered, Royce. Everybody was kind of doing things differently because everybody had been trained differently. The story I would hear over and over again from my team was: "Well, when I was trained, it was this person and this is what they told me." But then, when you sit with someone else, it was like, "Well, that person trained me and they told me to do it this way." There was on one source of truth.

00:05:40

So the very first thing I did was start to get processes documented. For us personally, we used OneNote. I love OneNote. We have different notebooks within OneNote and different pages. So I started to sit down with my team and just say, "Okay, you're doing it this way. You're doing it that way. Here's what we think is the right way to do it. Now let's get that process documented." That was kind of step one, just to figure out: Where are we? Where do we need to be? Then get it documented. 

Then, of course, the next step – [crosstalk] Oh, I'm sorry, Royce. Go ahead. 

Royce Morse: Sorry to interrupt, but how long did that process take, out of curiosity?

Candace Jaramillo: That process, I would say – to be honest, writing documentation happens every day. We still find better ways to do things, or things change in the business and we have to update a process. But to get our initial processes documented, I would say, took about three months, three to four months, for us to sit down and document all of those processes.

00:06:45                     

Royce Morse: Did you do flowcharting, out of curiosity? That's something we do recommend for people.

Candace Jaramillo: We didn't do flowcharting, Royce, I think because I came in and everything was such a mess we kind of had to start with: Where's our highest-risk points? Obviously, you're not going to get everything solved overnight. It took us three or four months to get everything documented, get the team retrained.

We needed to figure out: What's a priority? What's our highest-risk points? And get those fixed immediately and then you kind of work backwards from there. 

Royce Morse: Right, so you have to do triage and hit the riskiest, most problematic things first and then work your way down to the more refined tweaks, later on, I assume.

00:07:33                     

Candace Jaramillo: That's it, exactly.

Royce Morse: So how did the employees take to all of this? What was their reaction?

Candace Jaramillo: That is a really good question, Royce, because I've been doing this a long time, and I think oftentimes what happens when I've been in other jobs is you hear from employees: "Well, we've always done it this way. Why do you need me to change?" Interestingly enough, with this time, what I found was happening – and this was also some of the source of the turmoil – was they had a manager who wanted to control everything and didn't empower her team, so she often ended up being a bottleneck.

00:08:17

The team was getting beat up for that. They were well aware that mistakes were being made, all eyes were on them. That's not a great feeling. 

Royce Morse: No, it's a bad situation to be in because you're powerless to change it, and you know it's broken, but there's not much you can do about it.

Candace Jaramillo: No, especially when you have a manager who's a bit of a tyrant, right? People feared her and that is not how you lead any team. It was interesting because when I came in, even though we were making a lot of changes, the team was so open to them, and I think they were open for two reasons.

00:08:58

One, they didn't like how it felt to be getting beat up, and so the changes were – they could see that the changes were helping AP be seen in a more positive light. They knew we were mitigating their chance of making mistakes. Number two was they just never felt empowered. So for them to feel like they had a manager who cared about them and wanted to teach them, trusted them, asked their opinions, involved them in decision-making, they were all about the change. It was very refreshing, and they took to it very well. 

Royce Morse: That's awesome. I'm sure that that made things a whole lot easier to get some things changed. They were to the point where they were willing to embrace that change. They were desperate for it, it sounds like. 

00:09:51                     

Candace Jaramillo: They were. They were desperate for it. Now, again, reminding you that not every job is like that. I've definitely had jobs where people are a little bit more resistant to the change. And when you find yourself if that in situation, I think you need to remember: Why are they afraid of the change? And kind of approach the change with a "what's in it for them?" kind of mentality. And include them.

If you ask them, "What do you think works? What do you think doesn't work? What would you recommend?" and they make the recommendation, if you can kind of lead them to the recommendation that you want by coaching, they're going to adapt to that change a lot easier. 

So those would be my tips if you walk into a situation where people are a little bit more resistant to change, because I think step one of kind of getting AP a seat at the table is your people. It's your time. You've got to make sure you're got your team dialed in. The first step to getting recognition is that somebody steps back and says, "Whoa! Look at what this team is doing. This is amazing. There's no mistakes. Look what they're processing." 

00:11:08

You've got to get them that recognition. I think a big part of getting them that recognition is that they have to feel their value, so make sure your team knows how important their job is. Tell them often. Tell them why they do the things they do. My team often didn't even understand, I don't think, the impact of the things that they were doing every day, so make sure your team knows and understands their value because when they understand that, they're going to live up to it, and then the rest of the company is going to see that value as well. 

Royce Morse: Yeah, I think that's super important. I think, in their mind, it's just a matter of: "Oh, well, we just pay the bills."

Candace Jaramillo: Exactly.

00:11:53                     

Royce Morse: But, in point of fact, almost every dollar that goes out of the business goes through their hands. That's a big responsibility, and I just don't think that registers with them sometimes.

Candace Jaramillo: It doesn't. And I think it's our job as leaders to remind them. I remind my team every meeting. I tell them, "You guys are the gatekeepers. It's our job to make sure everything that goes out the door is right because we are that stopping point, that late gate where we can check things, make sure things are correct.

Royce Morse: Yeah, absolutely. Now let's talk about the training process just a little bit and how you went about doing that. You said that you had to re-write the procedures, processes and procedures, to be consistent. How did you go about making sure that everybody was complying with those changes?

00:12:55                     

Candace Jaramillo: The first thing that we did – because it's a lot of information when you're talking about retraining. I have a fairly big department. We kind of broke our department down into teams, so we'd have an invoice team, a vendor team, a payments team. And then within those teams we could start to really focus and train them on the things that mattered most to their desk.

00:13:24

We would sit with those teams individually, do that training, but then we'd also come together as the complete AP department once a month, and we would share with the entire team just kind of at a high level, these are the things that they're doing on the other teams, because everybody needs to know. Where does it come from? Where does it go? How does it affect other people in my department? They really appreciated that knowledge. After we did the training – 

Royce Morse: Yeah.

Candace Jaramillo: Oh, go ahead, Royce.

00:13:57                     

Royce Morse: I was just going to say, I think that's a really important point, because I think they need to see it from a higher level. When you're in the weeds every day and you're just cranking out invoice payments, you may lose sight of the bigger picture. In order to really be as effective and make the contribution that you can make, you need to have that higher-level perspective, right?

Candace Jaramillo: Exactly. And my team was thirsty for that. They wanted to understand. They had been so siloed and had lived in a "just do what you're told to do and don't ask any questions," that they were thirsty for that knowledge.

Royce Morse: That's unfortunate. It really seems like a terrible waste of people's insight, because they're doing the doing every single day, and they're the ones that know where the choke points are, where the problems are. Your predecessor wasn't taken advantage of that information, just shutting it down like, "I'm the all-knowing one. Just do what I say."

00:15:06                     

Candace Jaramillo: That was it, exactly, Royce. And then as far as to answer your question [of] how did we make sure the training was sticking – because it was a lot. We did find ourselves in situations where sometimes we needed to go back and repeat certain parts of the training. The way we caught that was just by doing a good, old-fashioned kind of QA process where we would randomly pick some invoices that each processor had processed, and we'd look and see: Did they do A, B, C, and D? And it helped us identify [that] everybody's different, everybody learns different. Maybe this person picked up on one thing but not another thing, and somebody else picked up on the other thing.

00:15:51

That allowed us to then do one-on-ones with people and kind of retrain them on the areas where we saw maybe the training hadn't quite stuck yet. 

Royce Morse: That's, I think, very insightful. Another thing that we also think about and talk about a lot is the mission statement. Now, companies have mission statements, but we, at IOFM, recommend that departments also have mission statements that support the larger organizational mission statement. Is that something that you did?

Candace Jaramillo: Yes, Royce, I did do exactly that. I will say, at the company I'm at now, we didn't have – our mission statement is basically to be the best damn company we can be, so I took that and I wrote us basically a mission statement that said, "Okay, how do we make sure we're being the best we can be?" And it kind of boiled down to making sure we're paying the right vendor the right amount of money, we're paying them on time, we're working with supply chain to open communication, and working with our vendors to solve problems. Every month when we have our AP team meeting, I have that at the bottom of our agenda. For the first few months, we would read it together as a team, and now it's just kind of on there, every month, just to remind the team, hey, this is where we are. This is our mission. This is what we do.

00:17:19

And then making sure they understand how that impacts the company, because it's one thing to just say, "Hey, we're going to pay the right vendor the right amount of money on time," but it's like, why do we do those things? We do those things because our company prides itself in being the very best that it can be. So make sure when you write those mission statements, again, always reiterating that message to your team: Why do we do this? How does it support the larger company? And get your department that recognition. 

Royce Morse: Yeah, that sounds like a really good strategy. Once you had gotten to that place where everybody was pretty much on board, you had your processes, people knew how to do things and they were doing them consistently, and they were giving you feedback and input, how do you communicate that up the chain?

00:18:15                     

Candace Jaramillo: That's a great question, Royce, and that's kind of the last piece to tie this all together. The way I like to do it is just invite my chief accounting officer, your CFO, whoever you think the appropriate people are, to a meeting. I try to do it at least twice a year, and I put together a PowerPoint, and I basically just brag on my team. I like to just show them: Here's the processes that we've improved, why we improved them, what that means. Here's money we've saved. Here's money we've collected.

00:18:52

Go into that meeting making sure you understand what's important to your company – be it the controller, the chief accounting officer, the CFO – what do they care about? Is it the bottom line? Is it maintaining a relationship with suppliers? What do they are about? And then make sure you highlight what your team has done to get them to that overarching goal, and do it often. 

Royce Morse: Yeah, that sounds like a really good strategy. And I think that kind of soliciting what their main focus is, is super important, because that's how your organization is going to support the bigger organization.

00:19:40

Once you started doing this, did upper management's attitude toward AP change? 

Candace Jaramillo: Yes, it did, completely. I guess I'm very lucky. The company that I work for now, our chief accounting officer even came to our AP team meeting and told the team the difference that he's seen, and that he doesn't stay at wake anymore worrying about AP.

I was lucky enough that my chief accounting officer did that on his own. I've been in jobs where that wasn't the case, and I had to ask for it, just like, "Hey, I just showed you everything we've done. Do you agree we've done a great job? Would you mind coming to one of my team meetings and telling my team how you feel this has impacted the company?" Get that kind of like 360 feedback and that support. 

I can sit there and have the conversation with upper management, but I'm not the one doing the work out there every day. The team is, so they need to hear it, and they need to hear it from him or from upper management – her, him, whoever that is. 

00:20:46                     

Royce Morse: Right, I think that's a really brilliant insight. That makes them feel connected to the organization and not like they're just some department off sitting in a room, doing menial tasks and not being involved in the greater goals of the company.

Kind of to wrap up, tell me how often – this is not a one-and-done thing. This is a repeating thing that you have to do in order to maintain the lines of communication and make sure that people, whether they've been with your organization for a long time or if they're new, that they are kind of in the culture and understand what the expectations are and are hearing the important feedback from their peers, from you, and from upper management. How often do you do that? 

Candace Jaramillo: I think it varies, Royce. Our company is going through a lot of growth right now. Like I said at the beginning of the podcast, we're constantly making changes to processes and updating documentation as the business grows and forces us to change.

00:22:03

I think you've got to remember, too, as a leader, your job is to kind of be the cheerleader, so you've got to be really in tune with your team. We're going through kind of a phase right now where you start to notice some of the things that we should be checking are falling off, and so it's time to just rally the troops again, do another training, remind everybody why we're doing what we're doing again. That, I think, never stops. That's a constant cycle. Like I said, we get together monthly, and I feel like there's always something new to cover or something new to train on. 

I would recommend getting together with your team at least monthly. We get together as a whole department monthly, smaller teams get together once a month, and then we have one-on-ones every other week, so we're making sure we're staying in tune with what's going on with our team and giving them a chance to ask questions, voice concerns. 

00:23:04

And then when it comes to upper management, make sure – like I said, I'd love to do it quarterly to get together with my upper management. I make sure I do it at least twice a year. 

And the last thing I'd like to say, too, is I've been in many situations where there's meetings or things happening that I haven't been included in, that AP could add value to. Don't be afraid to raise your hand and just speak up and say, "Hey, I think this is a meeting I'd like to come to. I feel like AP has something we could offer here." 

I don't think anybody is ill-intented in forgetting about AP, but I do think we often get forgot about when it's time to have a seat at the table. So don't be afraid to ask. Think of doing it as something that supports your team, to be at that table, because it's a chance to say, "Hey, wait a minute. You guys have a problem. We can help with that." 

00:24:01                     

Royce Morse: That's brilliant insight, yeah. You really have to kind of put yourself out there a little bit, especially if you're working in an organization that hasn't really recognized AP as a value-added department in the past. I would guess you do have to raise your hand sometimes and just say, "Um, I can help you. Come on, invite us. We'll help you get to where you want to be."

I really appreciate your comments. I think it's very insightful. I think people are going to find it extremely helpful. I love your management approach. I think it's a very humane and also extremely productive way to approach managing an AP team. Thank you, Candace. 

00:24:37                     

Candace Jaramillo:  Awesome. Thank you, Royce, a pleasure talking with you today.

Grace Chlosta: Thank you so much for listening to the IOFM podcast. Remember to head on over to the Member Forum to discuss today's episode and provide ideas for our next one. And to stay up to date on IOFM's current events, both in-person and virtually, head on over to IOFM.com.