Does this scenario sound familiar?
Happy Basket provides a weekly fruit basket for the office every month and invoices monthly for the fruit and delivery. Heather, the office administrator, is responsible for managing this supplier and approving all invoices. Currently, the invoice is sent to Accounts Payable by email where it is automatically captured. However, Sandji, the Accounts Payable professional must manually determine the correct authorizer and forward the invoice to Heather for approval. By adding Heather as the Supplier Responsible for Happy Basket, invoices can be automatically distributed for approval and Sandji can avoid an extra manual step that takes time away from resolving more important issues.
Solution
Remove manual approval routing to increase automation.
What if you could save days every month by simply having invoices for relevant suppliers automatically routed for approval, removing the non-value add task of manually assigning the same approver again and again?
For suppliers you work with on a regular basis where invoices are always reviewed and approved by the same person, there is a simple way to automatically assign approvers, this is known as Supplier Responsible.
Benefits
- More than half of you could identify suppliers where routing was going to the same person 90% of the time
- The group consensus was it takes on average one minute to determine the correct approver and manually route the invoices
- By setting up Supplier Responsible, customers in the room could save up to 21 working days per year!
Set up
- Setting up Supplier Responsible is easy and is usually done by the administrator who has access to update supplier records.
- A few things you should think about:
- Who are the top suppliers you work with?
- Do those invoices always go to the same people for approval?
- Are there different approvers based on your company structure?
- Manual distribution of an invoice for authorization impacts the automatic distribution ratio and ultimately the throughput time of an invoice. After you have setup Supplier Responsible for relevant suppliers, you can measure and track your performance by using the standard benchmark Automatic Distribution rate.