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Paying all your suppliers electronically makes sense—in theory. At a high level, doing so is a simple enough task—you enable your AP team to make all their payments through electronic means. Then you have yourself a cost-generating solution. But to your AP team—the people at ground level—there’s much more behind the process than sending payments. They also must track sent payments, follow up on uncashed checks, handle fraudulent cases, and work with suppliers who are missing payments for one reason or another.

Unfortunately, most electronic payment businesses that tout themselves as solutions only find value at the high-level glance, which is a detriment to your team. For example, while banks and card networks move money electronically, they don’t provide much supplier support, which is often needed to take payments across the finish line. In the end, that task often falls to your employees once again.

AP also tends to use the oldest equipment of any team in most companies. They’re still running error-prone manual processes, with stacks of checks and invoices on their desks in need of circulation on foot. Process exceptions and one-off requests torment them. Suppliers are calling and emailing, looking for payment. At the same time, AP handles other issues like lost or erroneous invoices, payments landing in the wrong accounts, or which otherwise need attention.

The whole operation is like a house of cards. Even if you know you need to change, nobody wants to touch a single card for fear that the entire thing will fall apart. Asking them to enable suppliers for electronic payments is extra work, and not usually in anybody’s job description. It’s hard enough to get the regular work done; heaven forbid somebody on the team gets ill, goes out on leave, or quits. They’re really under a lot of pressure.

A new generation of payment service providers automates payments in the cloud and offloads much of the support work that AP usually handles instead of focusing on higher-value initiatives. When your process was held together with duct tape and string, it can be hard to imagine confidently handing the work to a service provider. To understand what’s possible today, let’s look at what payment support services look like at scale here at Nvoicepay.

Supplier Enablement

When our customers sign on with Nvoicepay, our implementation team goes right to work with their AP staff to get supplier lists and instructions for reaching out to them. If any suppliers require special arrangements due to prior agreements with them, we take those into account.

Our customers often pay many of the same suppliers. Because Nvoicepay maintains an extensive network of suppliers—about 800,000 of them—many suppliers are instantly payable without additional work. When suppliers aren’t already in our system, we campaign to get them electronically payable in a fashion that meets their individual needs. We prioritize Mastercard due to the ease of payment for all parties involved. As time goes on, the Nvoicepay team maintains supplier data, keeping up with changes on behalf of our customers.

Suppliers that still need to receive physical checks can do so. Even if they do, the process remains electronic on the AP side so that customers can issue check payments in the same batch as other electronic payments. Supplier questions are routed to our in-house support team, alleviating another large responsibility from AP.

Training and Implementation

While suppliers are being enabled, our technical support team trains the accounts payable group that will be using the software in a succinct, one-hour meeting. We know that AP turnover can be high, so we offer additional training by request to ensure that the customer’s entire team remains up-to-speed.

Our technical support team also works with the implementation team to ensure that the initial configuration caters to each company’s specific needs.

Making Payments

In the life of a manual process, AP teams need to fill out bank forms for each ACH batch or access their bank website to make wire payments. Payment automation consolidates those tasks—and more—into a single file from their ERP, which contains all the invoices the company wants to be paid. Nvoicepay disperses those payments based on each suppliers’ preferred payment type, set up in the enablement step, and continuously maintained.

On the back end, customers have total visibility into how those suppliers are getting paid, when checks cleared, and when Mastercard payments were issued. They can also track unprocessed Mastercard payments.

Payment Modification

Nvoicepay guarantees every payment, and as such, the phone number listed on the remittances is ours. If there’s an issue with a payment, your suppliers call our payment support team directly, and we work through any questions they may have. Our software also includes a form that alerts our Payment Modification team of the need to resolve errors, refunds, reissues, or stop-payments. We turn those requests around quickly, as quickly as a customer could call their bank and do it themselves. We take as good care of our customers’ suppliers as they would. No matter where an error occurs, we work to resolve it and to keep our customers informed throughout the process.

If a supplier reaches out to their customer directly, the customers also have visibility into our system. They can handle those one-off events without trouble.

Card Retention

Many AP groups have dealt with card programs that promised significant rebates but didn’t deliver. Making as many payments as you can by card is what helps you maximize rebates. To aid this, another faction of our operations team—the supplier services group—reaches out to suppliers who haven’t processed their cards after a set time. The team works with suppliers to answer any questions they have about the payment, and to support the processing of as many cards as possible.

Within the supplier services team is a retention group, which assists suppliers who may want to stop accepting card payment. That’s the most beneficial payment method due to the rebate. Still, there can be various issues on the supplier end, such as card fees, or challenges with remittance or reconciliation. The retention group learns what the supplier objections are to card. If we can’t work through them, we enable a different payment type.

While most suppliers can process virtual cards through their terminal once they receive the remittance, others have set requirements or separate terminals that require specialized processes. In those cases, our group called AP Concierge will either call the supplier directly to make payments or pay through their terminal. Our internal goal is to have less than three percent of unprocessed cards monthly. After 60 days, unprocessed payments must be refunded to the customer, which creates unnecessary work.

Embracing True Support

Why don’t companies pay all of their suppliers electronically? Because it takes a village to do all the work around making payments! Nvoicepay’s dedicated teams support every piece of the payment process because we know that’s what it takes. It’s a rare AP team that can handle these pieces on top of getting payments out the door, let alone have special teams devoted to each area.

AP teams have been laboring under manual work and partially automated processes for so long; it’s hard to imagine someone taking all that work off their plate. But that’s precisely what we do.

And sometimes, it’s hard to imagine what AP jobs will look like when the payment process becomes automated. We don’t often see companies cut staff when they bring in Nvoicepay. Instead, we have found that companies reduce their staff growth rate, and that existing staff moves onto higher-value work.

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Angela Anastasakis is the SVP of Operations and Customer Success for Nvoicepay, a FLEETCOR company. She has more than 30 years of leadership experience in operations and product support. At Nvoicepay, Angela has been instrumental in leading Operations through rapid growth, while maintaining our 98% support satisfaction rating through outstanding service.

Not Just the Novelty

When I first started selling P2P solutions, the primary challenge I faced was a lack of awareness—most organizations didn’t know there was a better way to process invoices. Standard operating procedure was to hire a bunch of people to review invoices, manually enter them into the financial system, and get them paid. More invoices? Hire more people—just as it had been with payroll.

Some companies hired “Black Belts” to make changes to their processes by creating shared service centers or, in some cases, outsourcing the entire department to a Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) company. That had its own issues—namely lack of control and timing gaps, since many of these BPOs sat halfway across the globe.

As time went on, P2P solution providers became more widely known, and a growing number of companies adopted these solutions in order to reduce costs and increase efficiency by getting visibility into spend and putting more controls on how employees purchased goods or approved invoices.

Clearly that real challenge wasn’t lack of awareness. It was getting the project to the top of the list in a given company. Without a doubt, P2P solutions can drive positive ROI, but so can many other initiatives. Implementation of these types of projects can be lengthy, and eat up time and resources in procurement, finance and IT.

Based on my experience, for organizations with annual revenues greater than $500m, a typical P2P project can come with one-time implementation fees north of $250k (or more with the addition professional services) and implementation timeframes of nine months to a year or more. That’s a pretty big chunk of change for ROI that may take another year or so to manifest. As a result, these projects get pushed aside in favor of initiatives that generate revenue relatively quickly.

That was the case with countless companies I called on—they saw the value but still couldn’t get it done. Selling the ROI for P2P solutions was far more challenging than doing the same for payroll solutions. It was frustrating as hell.

The lightbulb clicked on for me in 2013 while attending an IOFM show in Orlando. Across the aisle from our booth was a company I’d never heard of: Nvoicepay. Thinking they were a competitor, I ventured over to see if I could gather some intelligence on them.

They weren’t a competitor at all. They didn’t match invoices to POs or automate the approval workflow for posting invoices to a financial system. They were a payment company that simplified supplier payments by any method—check, ACH or card—through a single interface. Plus, their solution complemented my invoice automation solution, and the increased efficiency and card rebates would significantly increase the ROI for my customer and help get the project to the top of their list! Now we could actually offer customer a procure-to-pay, solution, not just procure-to-ost.

Fast forward to 2019: I’m now working for Nvoicepay. Companies still want to automate their procure-to-pay processes, and still can’t figure out how to get the project onto the go list. Although P2P technology has improved significantly, those projects are still relatively lengthy and require resources—and therefore buy-in—from procurement, finance and IT.

Nvoicepay implementation is fast—we’re talking weeks, not months or years, to go live like a P2P project. We also require very few IT resources during the implementation, which doesn’t require the level of integration a P2P solution does. Quite frankly, when you send us a remittance file, we’ll pay 100% of your vendors regardless of payment type. Additionally, because we collect banking info from your vendors, we indemnify all payments and guarantee that funds will get to the appropriate supplier/vendor. You get a ton of process efficiencies, and the ROI starts on the first day a customer goes live, with monthly rebates generated from virtual card payments.

There’s still a conundrum. Companies want P2P but can’t figure out how to get there, and they’re not sure what to do first. Do we automate P2P and then finish it off by automating payments, or do we flip the scenario around? As companies trying to discern which should come first, I firmly believe that many companies may not fully understand what an enterprise payment platform can bring to the table and how the ROI it drives can fund their P2P project.

What I’ve Seen in 15+ Years in the P2P Space

Swinerton is a $3.6b construction company that implemented Nvoicepay’s Payment Gateway in a manner of weeks for just a few thousand dollars. They quickly started seeing monthly rebates via payments processed on virtual cards add up to $1m in the first year. Their finance department saw huge process efficiencies in their first year, and actually generated better relations with their vendors and contractors. Swinerton planned on leveraging the annual rebates to fund a T&E solution that they wanted to implement. The only thing they wished they did differently was to not take so long to decide on automation.

So, what should come first, the chicken or the egg? If egg = payments, then I say egg—and not because of the side of the aisle I sit on. I say this for my investment over the past 15+ years in the space with a desire to help our customers achieve their P2P goals and operate more profitably. Additionally, it is why most if not all P2P (procure-to-post) providers are trying to figure out how to automate payments!

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Jim Wright is the Vice President of Enterprise Sales in the East Region at Nvoicepay. He is a veteran of the financial industry, having served in senior roles at companies like Zycus, Corcentric, and SAP Ariba. With Nvoicepay, he delivers scalable payment solutions to enterprise companies and other large organizations.

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