Managing Accounts Payable

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October 2006 Table of Contents [ toggle snippets ]

• MAP October 2006 (full PDF issue)
• Exclusive Survey: Best Way to Improve Employee Expense Report Processing;
  New Research: 50 Metrics AP Pros Track to Boost Department Performance;
  1 How to Keep an Invoice-Outsourcing Provider on Its Toes;
  Which Bank Charges Can You Get at Markdown Prices?;
  Hiring: Pitfalls of Checking Job Applicants‘ Personal Web Pages;
  T&E: Sorting Out the Tricky Tax Rules for Home Entertaining;
  News Briefs;
  MAP Calendar;
  Accounts Payable Managers’ Forum
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• Exclusive Survey: Best Way to Improve the T&E Process
• When we asked over 400 of your peers how they improved their processing of employee expense reports the most, at the top of their list was to obtain better, more timely expense reports from employees. In fact, over half (58%) said this was the most successful way to save time and money.
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• New Research: 50 Metrics AP Pros Track to Boost Department Performance
• Almost half (46%) of AP departments we polled use benchmarking—up from 36% last year. This reinforces our belief that benchmarking will be an important tool for AP pros for some time to come. Almost 500 AP pros responded to our recent survey that will form the basis for the upcoming revision of our research report, AP Department Benchmarks & Analysis.
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• How to Keep an Invoice-Outsourcing Provider on Its Toes
• The growing trend in AP is to farm out some of the tasks of invoice processing—whether it be invoice scanning, data input, or payment processing. To make this successful, you need to monitor what the outside service provider is doing—just like you would monitor your own staff if you did the job in-house. But this can be a problem, since the operation is being done at a remote location—and sometimes in a foreign land.
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• Which Bank Charges Can You Get at Markdown Prices?
• AP generates a ton of transactions that trigger a slew of bank charges—everything from routine check payments to wire transfers to stop payments. And then there are the services—positive pay, account reconciliations, zero-balance account maintenance, and so on. Charges for all of this can really rack up. Luckily, you can cut these costs because banks tend to discount their charges. But what charges are the banks most likely to discount? The latest metrics on bank charges reveal what fees and services banks most frequently mark down.
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• Hiring: Pitfalls of Checking Job Applicants' Personal Web Pages
• Let’s say you’ve found the ideal candidate to fill that opening on your AP staff. She’s a recent college graduate with outstanding grades who did great in her job interview. Then you check a Web site where college students show pictures of themselves and discuss their interests. The candidate’s page on this site has pictures of her in provocative situations, and she lists as her interests drinking heavily, smoking marijuana, and partying until the wee hours.
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• Coming in Future Issues of MAP (October 2006)
• IOMA’s Exclusive Benchmark Data for Invoice Processing Costs, Productivity, and Error Rates
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• News Briefs (October 2006)
• The number of invoices that are outsourced for processing will double over the next five years, predicts the Gartner Group, a leading business technology research firm. They say more than 90 million invoices are currently processed using so-called AP BPO (business process outsourcing) providers, which is a tiny portion of the total number of invoices processed worldwide. AP BPO includes invoice receipt, verification and matching with purchase order, authorization, assigning payment form (check, wire, or automated clearinghouse), and disbursement.
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• Accounts Payable Calendar (October 2006)
• The IOMA/TAPN AP Seminar & Certification Exam: The Best Training Program Available for Accounts Payable Pros
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• Best Practice for Adding New Vendors
• Following a major master vendor file cleanup, Van Dyne Crotty (Dayton, OH), a uniform rental company, wanted to make sure the file stayed clean. It was decided that no payment would be made until a W-9 was completed by the vendor. Of course, AP would be in the line of fire if purchasing wanted an invoice paid before the TIN was received. Here's their solution.
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• T&E: Sorting Out the Tricky Tax Rules for Home Entertaining
• The holiday season will soon be upon us and many executives will step up their entertainment of clients—some of which will occur at the executives’ homes. However, unlike traditional entertainment expenses, entertaining at home is subject to tricky tax rules. Under certain conditions, these costs are bona fide deductible business expenses. In other cases, however, they are not—and they can trigger taxable income to the execs if your company foots the bill.
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