Use Case | Accounts Payable Automation - Exploring Key Challenges & Benefits

Introduction

Efficient accounts payable processes are the backbone of any thriving business. They ensure that financial obligations are met promptly, maintaining healthy cash flow and fostering good supplier relationships. However, several challenges often plague these processes, impeding their efficiency and effectiveness.

The High Volume of Invoices Needing Approval

In many organisations, the sheer volume of invoices requiring approval can be overwhelming. This high volume creates significant pressure on the accounts payable team, often leading to productivity dips. When bottlenecks occur, they not only delay payments but also disrupt the overall financial workflow.

Delays in Approving Invoices

Delays in the approval of invoices can stem from various sources, such as lengthy internal approval chains or miscommunications. These delays adversely affect cash flow, potentially leading to missed discounts for early payments and strained supplier relationships, further compounding financial challenges.

Lack of Visibility into Invoice Commitments

Visibility into invoice commitments is crucial for accurate financial planning and reporting. Unfortunately, many businesses struggle with this, particularly as the end of the month approaches. The lack of real-time data forces companies into a reactive stance, complicating month-end closes and impeding strategic decision-making.

Manual Data Entry Issues

Manual data entry is fraught with the potential for human error, from incorrect invoice amounts to misallocated expenses. These mistakes are not only time-consuming to correct but can also lead to significant financial discrepancies, undermining the integrity of financial records.

The Solution: Scanning Invoices into an Approval Process

Automating the scanning of invoices into a streamlined approval process marks a significant shift towards digital transformation. This approach not only accelerates the receipt and processing of invoices but also minimises the risk of errors associated with manual entry, enhancing overall efficiency.

Implementing a Web-Based Portal

A web-based portal offers a centralised platform where users can access invoice information in real-time. Its user-friendly interface facilitates efficiency, allowing stakeholders to view the current status of invoices, approvals, and pending actions, thus enhancing transparency and collaboration.

Alerts for Budget Overages

Proactive alerts for invoices that risk exceeding budget allocations are a crucial feature of accounts payable automation. These alerts enable departments to manage their budgets more effectively, preventing financial oversights and ensuring that expenditures remain within allocated limits.

Outcomes of Accounts Payable Automation

The outcomes of implementing accounts payable automation are substantial. Workload reductions allow teams to focus on more strategic tasks rather than mundane data entry. Enhanced visibility into expenditure and commitments enables better, more informed decision-making, ultimately leading to improved financial health.

Future of Accounts Payable Automation

The future of accounts payable automation is promising, with emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning poised to bring even greater efficiencies. Continuous improvement in these systems will further streamline financial processes, driving businesses towards even greater operational excellence.

Interested in transforming your business? We have been working with Australian organisations for over 20 years to help them enable productivity and efficiency gains with the help of technology.

Email: sales@advance.net.au

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Hook, Line, and Sinker Building Phishing Resilience in Australian Businesses - Whitepaper

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The threat of phishing cannot be underestimated—nor can it be entirely eliminated. However, with diligent attention to education, preparation, and response, Australian businesses can build a resilient defence that significantly reduces the risk and potential impact of phishing attacks.

We’ve created this whitepaper to help raise awareness so you and your business can avoid being compromised.

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Use Case | Australian Healthcare Provider Maximises Efficiency and Success Through Data Integration, Business Intelligence and Modern Reporting

Business owners, CEOs, managers, and employees all face decisions daily that impact the success of our organisations and individual roles. It is crucial to use data to make the best decisions and focus energy on getting the best return on time investment. We have lots of data, that is a certainty!

One of our clients in the healthcare sector had a significant problem with data integration and effective reporting. While providing medical devices for patients, they were unable to make data-driven decisions due to lagging and inaccurate reporting. This impacted their appointing setting across the entire business and across various locations in Australia.

Reporting challenges faced were:

• A lack of insight into the business, proving difficult to make good decisions on staffing and resource planning.

• Difficulty determining which clinics were busy and the number of reserved appointments/placeholders available within the calendars.

• Inconsistency across the retail brands.

• Different diary management systems and appointment definitions.

• Operational data entry issues.

The business needed to run more efficiently, and management had to make effective decisions.

To address these challenges, we used a Business Intelligence tool (PowerBI, Qlik, and Tableau are popular examples) to create a holistic view of business performance and leveraged the data warehouse for the brands.

Data integration and Business Intelligence tools allowed us to:

• Create reports according to exact Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

• Create a mapping table for appointment types and a traffic light "dashboard" for quick identification of low/high-performing areas, with a drill-down function for further investigation.

• We can now examine the percentage of booked/busy areas by business unit, state, clinic, and medical practitioner to make changes in real time.

• Determine the number of reserved "test" appointments available.

• Check for free space within the calendars.

• Enable reconciliation and check for any data entry errors.

Using this approach provided the following business and efficiency benefits:

• A holistic view of the business.

• Management can make informed decisions on where to deploy resources. Call centre staff can be tasked with booking appointments for clinics with a high vacancy rate or moving appointments forward if needed.

• Connecting various data sources highlighted the inconsistent format/terminology used across different clinics, which was then improved.

• Reduction in errors due to manual data entry.

You may already have access to Microsoft PowerBI or have used it before, but are you getting the business benefits discussed above? We work on new projects to make clients more efficient and effective with better data integration, reporting, and insights.

Phone: 08 8238 6500

Email: sales@advance.net.au

Website: www.advance.net.au

DATA: Data Debt - A Silent Challenge in Data Engineering

In the realm of data engineering, the spotlight often falls on technological innovation and how to manage burgeoning datasets efficiently. Yet, a critical but less discussed aspect is 'data debt.'

What is Data Debt?

Data debt arises when shortcuts in data handling, such as collection, storage, and management, are taken. Driven by the urgency to produce results, compromises like embedding transformations directly into SQL, instead of utilising variables, are made. Although this might offer immediate time savings, it can lead to poorly structured datasets and overlooked documentation, causing long-term complications.

Real-World Impact

The repercussions of data debt are significant and widespread. While no one intentionally codes a server’s IP address only to change the production server pre-weekend with a Monday board meeting looming, such scenarios are not unheard of. This often results in teams spending excessive time deciphering value calculations and dependent data sources, causing project delays and data inaccuracies.

Strategies to Mitigate Data Debt

Documentation: While documenting data sources, transformations, and assumptions can seem burdensome, it's invaluable for managing complexity. Balancing the speed of development with adequate documentation is key. Encouraging new hires to contribute to documentation and code improvement can also be effective. This not only ensures the upkeep of your data processes but also fosters a learning environment.

Data Governance: Implementing a solid data governance framework is essential. This involves establishing clear policies and procedures for data management to minimise inconsistencies and inefficiencies, ultimately reducing data debt.

Regular Audits: Conducting regular audits is crucial. Surprisingly, some ETL/ELT processes yield inconsistent results upon repetition. Regular audits help identify data quality issues, code alterations, and state-dependent calculations, ensuring reliability and consistency in data processing.

Looking Ahead
As Joel Spolsky aptly put it, "code doesn't rust," but in our interconnected world, even code can 'rust.' Adapting swiftly is crucial, yet challenging when burdened with significant data debt.

One lingering question remains: Is managing data debt a technical challenge or a strategic business issue that requires proper budgeting and management?

Have you encountered similar challenges? How does your organisation address data debt?

Use Case | Unlocking Efficiency: Data Integration Transforms Travel and Accommodation Business

Data is the lifeblood of success, but it's also overwhelming, and people often ask us where to start with a data project. Usually, it's the place that is causing significant pain.

In the example below, we discussed the existing process and the challenges this causes and applied a process and software to automate and simplify the process.

Invoice/File Processing

Challenges

1. Invoice Overload

Travel and accommodation businesses deal with a high volume of invoices daily. Manually processing and approving these invoices can be overwhelming, leading to delays, errors, and inefficiencies.

2. Visibility Gap

Without real-time visibility into invoice commitments, businesses often find themselves in the dark until month-end or the next reporting cycle. This lack of transparency hampers decision-making and financial planning.

3. Manual Data Entry Woes

The tedious task of manually entering invoice details consumes valuable time and resources. Errors are common, and the process is prone to bottlenecks.

Solutions

1. Streamlined Approval Process

We’ve transformed the way invoices are handled. By implementing an automated scanning and approval process, we enabled swift and accurate invoice management. Say goodbye to paperwork overload!

2. Web-Based Portal

Our user-friendly web portal empowers clients to track invoices in real-time. From submission to approval status, everything is at their fingertips. No more waiting for month-end reports!

3. Budget Alerts

Our system proactively alerts departments and projects when invoices threaten to exceed budgets. Timely notifications prevent financial surprises and allow for course corrections.

Benefits

1. Workload Reduction

Significantly reduce manual effort. Staff can focus on strategic tasks, knowing that routine processes are automated.

2. Informed Decision-Making

Real-time visibility enables better decisions. Businesses can allocate resources wisely, optimise spending, and stay ahead of financial commitments.

Data and system integration is not just about solving problems. This type of work empowers businesses to thrive. Efficiency, transparency, and informed decision-making are the cornerstones of our success.

Interested in transforming your business? Reach out to us today below.

Email: sales@advance.net.au

Phone: +61 8 8238 6500

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Cybersecurity Myths Debunked - Whitepaper

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Cybersecurity is no longer a new topic for most organisations.

Digital transformation creates incredible opportunities in almost all industries, but it brings with it unique and modern challenges. While those challenges are generally understood, several myths still surround them. In this whitepaper, we take a look at some of the common ones and check the facts.

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Data Security - ASD Cyber Threat Report 2024

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Every business needs to protect its data. The Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) releases a Cyber Threat Report every year that covers the state of cybersecurity, cybercrime, and cyber resilience in Australia. In this whitepaper, we summarise and analyse the most important findings that are essential to small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs).

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Cybersecurity: Cybersecurity Incident Response Plan

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A CIRP empowers business leaders to take a proactive, predictable approach to cybersecurity incident management—rather than waiting for an incident to occur and trying to determine how to respond under intense pressure.

In this whitepaper, we’ll delve into the essential components of a CIRP and how to create one that suits your organisation’s specific needs.

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Cybersecurity: What is a cyber-aware culture, why it’s important, and how to create one.

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Employees can be a business’s greatest cybersecurity asset or its biggest vulnerability. As modern businesses place greater emphasis on technical cybersecurity defences and controls, cyber attackers are increasingly focusing on the ‘human factor’ by targeting employees.

It’s often said that a business is only as secure as its least informed employee. No matter how much a business has invested in cybersecurity, the unfortunate truth is that it can all be undone in seconds by a single employee who lacks a basic understanding of cybersecurity. This is why building a “securityaware culture” within an organisation is not just a high return on investment, but a cybersecurity necessity.

So, what is a Security-Aware Culture? Read the whitepaper to get a grasp on this important element in protecting your data, improving compliance and safeguarding intellectual property.

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Cloud Security - A Shared Responsibility | Understand the basics

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Using cloud software like Xero, MYOB, or Salesforce? Our free whitepaper provides a foundation of cloud cybersecurity considerations to ensure your data is secure.

While it would be nice to say that security in the cloud is purely the responsibility of the cloud service provider, the reality is that such an important responsibility must be shared between the cloud provider and the consumer.

However, ‘cloud’ is a broad term that describes several different technical frameworks, and the security responsibilities are shared differently in each.

This paper will cover the three most common cloud frameworks and how security responsibilities are split between the provider and the consumer.

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Essential Eight Best Practices Guide: Multifactor Authentication

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Have you ever been annoyed by those multi-factor authentication (MFA) codes that are sent to you via SMS or email when you try to log in to your online accounts? While it's true that these codes can be a bit of a hassle, they serve an incredibly important purpose - protecting your accounts from being stolen. Also, we can actually make those codes a much more seamless experience with lower friction and fewer steps to gain access to your systems.

In today's digital age, over 5 billion people are connected to the internet, and any of them are potential cybercriminals who may try to guess your username and password to gain access to your accounts.

While it's essential to use strong, unique passwords for all of your online accounts, it's not always enough to protect you from account takeovers. That's where MFA comes in. This security feature requires you to provide an additional form of verification, such as a code that is sent to your phone or email or available in an app, which is needed to log in to your account. And it's incredibly effective - MFA has been shown to block 99.99% of account takeover attempts.

Check out the whitepaper which covers MFA in more detail above.

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