Getting started with an electronic payment program is not as difficult as it might appear at first glance. Accounts payable manager Cathy Hoying is well aware of the advantages of paying suppliers electronically. Her company, Copeland Corporation, pays over 50% of its trade payables using the ACH. She recently talked with us about how her company achieved this noteworthy goal and shared the documentation she uses to make it work.
If you’re a regular MAP reader, then you already know that positive pay is the best protection available against check fraud. You may also think you know just about everything there is to know about positive pay—unless you heard Bank of America’s Barbara Weiss speak at IOMA’s recent Accounts Payable Conference & Expo about the recent advances in this area. Weiss spoke about payee name verification, the new technologies being used for that purpose, and the future possibilities for a new product, dubbed ACH positive pay.
Many people make New Year’s resolutions in their personal lives but few do so in their professional lives—unless they are resolving to get a new job. MAP would like to encourage its readers to look at 2004 with a new eye and make some resolutions to improve their professional stature. These can be related to their jobs, their skills, or their staff.
This is a really bad time to be caught committing any sort of fraud in corporate America! While in the past, companies may have been reluctant to press charges, all that has changed. The accounting debacles and ensuing regulatory outcry now make it imperative that companies institute stringent controls as well as take action when corporate wrongdoing is uncovered. At first glance, these issues might seem to have no effect on accounts payable, but after closer examination, it becomes apparent that, as with most other corporate initiatives, accounts payable is affected.
One of the ways accounts payable managers measure the productivity of their operations is to look at the number of invoices handled by each processor in a month. The process, while fraught with potential problems, provides insights into the current procedure as well as where productivity gains might be wrung out of the system. The most successful accounts payable departments benchmark against their own past performance as well as performance at peer companies. However, finding that peer information can sometimes be difficult. MAP’s benchmark survey can help with the metrics needed to measure invoice-processing productivity against companies of similar size and those in the same industry.
Processing of 1099s is not limited to year end anymore, explain Lynda and John Foertschbeck, tax managers at Deloitte. As part of an IOMA audio conference on the subject of 1099s and 1042-S, the speakers talked about the combined federal and state reporting allowed by some states as well as delineated key federal dates for accounts payable pros to monitor.
2009
