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For companies in the lower middle market (LMM), when it comes time to make process improvements, the accounts payable department is an easy target. Why? Because between the high volume of documents and the lack of efficiency due to never-ending manual processing, inefficient AP processes drain both your capital and your employees.

Workflow automation streamlines your business processes to reduce inefficiency, provide transparency and lower costs to generate greater ROI. Invoice and accounts payable automation is an excellent way for your business to get started.

Workflow automation can help you streamline your business processes in many different ways. Accounts payable automation is perhaps the easiest place to start. The process through which you’ll automate accounts payable can quickly transform the way you do business, but it’s important to take the time to implement everything properly.

Before automating your business process, it’s important to identify the most meaningful metrics so that you can measure and analyze the results. This sounds easy, but where do you start? What metrics are the most important? And why do this at all? We will answer these questions by looking at an example: accounts payable workflow.

Few moves better calibrate a company to the speed of modern business than transitioning to an outsourced, off-site digital mailroom. They eliminate bottlenecks and better utilize resources while making paper and electronic mail receipt and routing more efficient. Businesses using them through third-party digital mailroom partners put themselves in position to be more competitive and, ultimately, successful. Because of this, continuing to rely on an in-house, paper-based mailroom no longer makes much sense.

In today’s digital workplace, companies receive invoices by email at a higher rate than ever before. Even so, many still insist on printing out electronic invoices prior to processing them. Doing this defeats the purpose of email invoices in the first place, as bringing electronically-received invoices into the physical realm opens up firms to the same problems they face with paper: lost invoices, late payments, duplicate payments and a comprehensive lack of transparency and visibility into the accounts payable process.

Before making the move to an automated AP process, it’s important to consider how automation would change a company’s business practices. Things like payment schedules, reaction times and invoice processing costs will all be directly affected, but there’s more to it than that. Automation can also reveal a bevy of insights for managers and C-level executives that were never previously available. Once found, these new insights can influence strategic decisions going forward.