AP Department Benchmarks Report 2007: Invoice Processing Costs Decline; Automation Increases Productivity Sharply;
New Research: MAP Survey Reveals Corporate P-Card Usage and Policies;
Last-Minute Tips Make Year-End Close Smoother;
Management AP Employees With School-Age Kids Need Flexible Hours;
News Briefs;
MAP Calendar;
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The two most widely used AP benchmarks are the number of invoices AP employees can handle and the cost of managing those invoices. This is revealed in the latest version of IOMA’s AP Benchmarks and Analysis, which is based on a survey of almost 500 AP departments.
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This year, we kicked off new research into the use of corporate procurement cards (p-cards). We recently surveyed readers about their company’s use of p-cards and related policies, such as the card issuers used, percentage of spend handled by the p-card, internal controls, and categories of spending. Close Snippit | Read Article
No, it’s not too late to develop your plan for the year-end close. True, there are some things that, ideally, you should have already done. But luckily, you can still plan to get everything accomplished.
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With autumn now in full swing, colder weather and shorter days are not the only drawbacks. Your AP employees who are parents once again face the stresses of trying to balance work and their children’s after-school needs.
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Among AP departments that are processing an invoice for $4 or less, 36% are using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to extract invoice data. This is one of the preliminary findings of a new study soon to be released, conducted by Datacap Inc., and co-sponsored by IOMA (publisher of MAP) and Fujitsu, a maker of scanning hardware. Conversely, the study finds, among those who are paying $20 and up, 29% are not scanning at all. These results seem to indicate that there is a direct correlation between OCR use and cost, especially when you consider that manual input of invoice data represents the "heavy lifting" in AP.
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Juniper Networks (Sunnyvale, CA), a leading provider of network communications technology, processes 40,000 invoices per month. Four years ago, the company looked at its invoice processing efficiency and saw high costs and low productivity. A benchmarking initiative within the AP department was started to see where they were with their processes and to focus on opportunities to drive down costs, recalls Dorothea Lopuck, the company’s director of accounting services.
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2009
