ALKU’s rapid growth brought with it an urgent need to address an increasing volume of invoices. Their accounts payable (AP) process was outdated and relied heavily on time-consuming, manual data entry, and paper-based approvals. Physical invoices were slow to arrive and often resulted in payment delays. Processing more than 4,000 invoices annually, the organization’s AP team wanted to increase visibility into invoice status while simultaneously reducing the paper chase.
Their finance team’s challenges included:
- A manual AP process that struggled to keep pace with an increasing volume of invoices
- An inefficient, paper-based workflow that resulted in lost invoices and payment delays
- A lack of reporting capabilities that created invoice status blind spots
Our latest customer success story details how ALKU overcame these challenges using Certify AP. Highlights from the publication are shared below.
"Any company that is expecting growth needs to automate AP processes. Certify AP will save you the cost of hiring additional AP staff, and also give you time back for more innovative work to help your company grow."
– Dan Sangeorge, Cost Accounting Manager, ALKU
Standardization through centralization
ALKU knew it was important to have a central system for both expense and invoice management. Doing so would help standardize processes, drive user adoption, and increase efficiencies as the firm grows. “Having everything feed through a central system has given finance a lot more control,” said Sangeorge, adding that Certify AP completely streamlined ALKU’s AP process and delivered a return on investment almost immediately—both in terms of cost and time savings.
Improving visibility
According to Sangeorge, one of Certify AP’s most impactful benefits is its ability to provide complete visibility into spend. It’s led to more accurate budget forecasting and invoice tracking. In turn, it’s helped ALKU improve communication between AP and end-users. And their vendors are now paid on time, every time—with all the necessary information
upfront.
Connecting the workforce through the cloud
Certify AP’s digital, cloud-based solution supports ALKU’s dispersed workforce, which at the time of this post included seven offices across the US and nearly 300 employees. The solution easily adapts to the firm’s growth and makes it easy for finance to approve and pay invoices from anywhere. “We’ve continuously increased our employee count and revenue causing us to always need to adapt to growth. Certify AP is a solution that can easily scale with us and allow us to handle an increasing volume of invoices without additional headcount as ALKU continues its rapid growth.”
You can read about the strides in efficiency and growth ALKU has experienced as a result of implementing Certify AP by downloading their customer success story.