Partner With Other Departments to Turn Payments Into a Strategic Organization

Viewed narrowly, managing payments is simply about making sure invoices get paid correctly and in a timely manner. If you take a broader perspective, though, payments isn’t strictly a back office, operational organization. Because the payments department sees where the money goes and controls the flow, it’s in a unique position to collect data and cooperate with other departments, particularly procurement and the treasury, to drive corporate strategies related to improving working capital management and spend management.

Through payments automation, the payments department not only becomes more efficient. Payments automation also allows you to collect data and create reports that provide increased visibility into cash flow to financial executives. Automation can also integrate payments systems with enterprise resource planning and accounting systems, enabling inventory, receivables, and payables to be viewed holistically and completely.

Partner With Your Treasury Department for Strategic Money Management

Through process improvements that streamline the payments process, you can cut down on late payment penalties and start receiving early payment discounts instead, improving cash flow. But this decision needs to be tied to the company’s money management goals; when viewed strategically, there may be something more important to do with that money than get the early payment discount. This can only be evaluated once the payments process is efficient and the payments department is viewed as a partner in executing the strategy.

Partner With Your Procurements Department for Strategic Vendor Management

Once the payments department is able to support electronic invoicing and procure to pay, you can streamline interactions with vendors. This can enable the procurements team to negotiate better contracts and payment terms, improving supplier relationships. The data gathered through invoices can be utilized to ensure that contract terms are being adhered to.

Partner With Your Compliance Department for Strategic Data Management

Through a payments automation process that reduces the amount of paperwork triggered by payments, it becomes much easier for compliance to achieve its goals. Storing documents electronically reduces the cost of retaining records for mandated time periods; it also makes it easier to search through records in the event that becomes necessary. Applying security measures that limit access to data also becomes easier when records are electronic and measures like encryption can be enforced.

Partner With Your Technology Department to Meet Strategic Technology Goals

When introducing technology into your payments process, partner with the IT department to ensure that it will help them meet strategic technology goals. This means considering IT’s goals as part of your decisions when evaluating solutions such as cloud-based storage and mobile access to your applications. Don’t forget to evaluate the payments data you collect for IT’s benefit as well. The new “as a service” subscription model of purchasing technical infrastructure and applications means ongoing payments in an organization that hasn’t previously had to continuously monitor those kinds of expenses; you can help support them in transitioning to this new model.

Find Other Opportunities for Partnership to Demonstrate Your Strategic Value

If you think creatively, there are many other ways to make payments a valued strategic partner that helps the company achieve other goals. You can use big data analytics not only to identify ways to improve payments operations but also to analyze the data collected through the payments process to identify unexpected insights into how money flows out of the organization. These insights should be shared not only with financial management but also with the departments that are doing the spending.

Create a Vision of Payments Strategic Role

In today’s competitive business world, every department needs to contribute to a company’s success. Through abandoning a self-perceived narrow vision of its role, the payments department can identify ways its function can help meet corporate strategic goals, enabling both the business and the payments department to drive ongoing success.