APA Blogs

The move towards implementing robots in businesses can be both frightening and exciting. Many people are scared about what the future holds for work life if robots are able to take over part or all of their job function. Robots can take over various functions but what they can’t do is the cognitive side of what a human can do.

For this reason they will likely never completely take over job roles and humans will always be needed to oversee and complement what robots do. Artificial intelligence is on the move

Identifying the top five areas where business lose out on employee expenses is the focus for a forthcoming webinar session by webexpenses’ Tom Price.

The expenses specialist is taking part in a special APA (Accounts Payable Association) event that’s designed to share knowledge on smarter ways to manage such a difficult area of company finances.

It’s a knowledge that’s based on webexpenses’ vast experience, helping organisations throughout the globe to effectively manage, monitor and police their employees’ out-of-office costs.

How to control expense costs

The details of the webinar, presented by APA CEO Jamie

Guest Post by Neil Robertson

Over the past few years, there has been a fundamental change in the way the suppliers send their invoices to their customers. Specifically, the sending invoices by email as a PDF. Almost all accounting software provides this capability to do so as standard, it is simply a matter of turning it on.

From the supplier’s perspective, this saves the labour, ink, stationery and postage costs, is much more reliable and adds the additional days to the time available to your customer to pay you on time. As

After an amazingly successful AP Association Annual Conference and Expo this year, we wanted to highlight some of the fantastic comments that we received on the day. I could write a lengthy essay on the day but since there was so much feedback, it was felt that it would be best left to one-word displays and quotes from the many lovely attendees…

If you did not attend the conference but would like to read more about the day’s events, click here to read the round-up. In the meantime, if you attended,

Bitcoin. A word we have all heard so often but a lot of us don’t actually know what it is. Yes, it’s a digital currency that could increase drastically and make us a lot of money. But how does that digital currency actually translate into money? And is it safe to buy? I have heard of friends of friends who have lost thousands – perhaps you have too. The word Bitcoin also often conjures up thoughts of the dark web and either very high returns or very high risk. Let’s

You might be thinking, but isn’t a manager supposed to manage me? Why would I want to manage my manager? A common complaint from employees is about the quality of their management. Also called “managing up”, managing your manager could help you if you’ve ever wished that you could change certain traits in your manager or certain aspects of their management. Believe it or not, the nature of the relationship between employee and manager is not determined only by the manager. There are actually a number of ways you can guide

Getting noticed in any career is going to be a fairly challenging task, but within accounts payable, being recognised as a vital member of the finance team, it is especially so. In AP, it’s not just important to be able to move up in the career ladder, because even though the majority of us start off as AP clerks, we want to progress to team leader and management roles. In this post, we’ll discuss the most efficient ways to actually “get noticed” throughout your career in AP.

The entry route into

There is no doubt in any business industry how important statistics and reports are, but in Accounts Payable, they are especially crucial to the success of the department and therefore to the business as a whole. Without statistics, it is impossible for AP managers to truly understand their department and ensure every minute detail is taken into account – this is central to AP success because, as you’ll already know, it’s all about the numbers and the details!

AP staff will usually be focused on those statistics that track the business’s

Leadership with the accounts payable role is crucial to having a successful career. Not only do AP managers and team leaders need top-notch leadership skills, but anyone working with an AP role – from beginners right up to executives – needs to hone these skills. For some AP managers and AP staff who are required to lead team members, these leadership skills may not come naturally but this post will discuss the elements which should receive your focus…

Leadership encompasses many facets, not only the ability to lead and manage yourself,

I enjoyed Samantha Ryan’s recent “impassioned” blog about accounts payable automation and trained monkeys. So much so that I felt the need to respond because I totally agree with Samantha…but I also sit on the other side of the fence. Our invoice capture and approval automation solution, iCompleat, was designed from scratch to automate up to 90% of the account payable function and is probably the most disruptive software ever to impact AP.

The importance of accounts payable staff and management cannot be understated as it is critical to ensure that