Below is a visual overview of the Accounts Payable process. It’s a straightforward process where our bookkeeper and senior accountant work with your business to process vendor payments. As the company owner or employee, including you in the approval process is essential to ensure accuracy. The senior accountant serves as another layer of security and a way to double-check that all payments going out are correct per your business’s management team.
The overall process involves vendor invoices going to a designated email so they can be entered or automatically uploaded to your accounting software.
From there, management should review invoices and approve invoices for coding, which can be done by management or the accounting team.
After invoices have been coded, management should review bills entered once a week to double-check for accuracy.
The last step would be to run an Accounts Payable Aging Report to determine which vendors to pay.
From there, checks can be cut manually or automated to pay vendors.
As stated earlier, the overall process is pretty straightforward; the volume of work makes this take time. Some automation and AI tools can be used, but the data entered for the invoice must be double-checked for errors.
How Pricing Works for Accounts Payable
Pricing the accounts payable tasks has much to do with the volume of bills that must be processed and who will perform each function of the Accounts Payable process.
For example, if one business has staff coding and reviewing invoices, pricing for this service will be adjusted to match our team’s reduced workload. This may sometimes reduce the cost by 25 – 50%. At the same time, other businesses may prefer to have everything done by the accounting team due to efficiency and to avoid overloading their staff.
Another factor that goes into pricing is whether the bills are automatically paid each month. If they are paid automatically, you don’t need accounts payable; you need pricing for general bookkeeping services.
It’s good to remember that the cost may be lower to have in-house staff do some of the work, but it may be a better value to pay for the efficiency of a bookkeeper or accountant.