Receiving and entering your bills to your accounting solution is one thing. Making sure that you were billed correctly, actually received what you were billed for, making sure it’s paid on time, and paid using the method you desire is another.
With the approve to pay feature you can prevent bills being paid that are not ready to be paid, have a discrepancy. You can implement this globally so that every bill has to be approved before it’s paid or you can do it with just specific bills.
✓ Prevent Fraud
Having the right checks in balances in place helps prevent fraud. A practice in accounting to prevent fraud is to make sure no one person has full control over all parts of any given financial transaction. A way to do this is to designate people in charge of different parts of that process. Purchases must be approved by one person, the bill is entered by a clerk, and then must be approved to pay by a manager. The person then issuing the payment does not have access to changing (link to roles) the instrument (bill) and can only pay against it once it’s approved. In a smaller setting your accounting clerk or bookkeeper and enter and account for the bill but you being the business owner must approve them to issue payment before it’s actually issue.
✓ Ensure Information Accuracy
Unless you’re a one man show, you have different employees responsible for different things. They don’t always communicate in a way that ensure accuracy of data. The approve to pay feature allows you to push pause on the payables process to make sure that the information is accurate.
✓ Transparency
How transparent are your books? Well hopefully your employee’s don’t know about one another’s pay rates and incentives, but how much do the stakeholders know about what bills are being paid and the contents of those bills?
