I have always been intrigued with people that lean by viewing the opposite. If it is not this it is not that. I find myself doing a lot of that, which is the reason I came up with the opposite of risk.

Why?

Well… I have been writing a lot about Accounts Payable Automation and risk. It seem that people believe when the paper is gone so is the security. That’s not true. If you automate correctly not only will you gain time savings and have a better process, you will become more secure and have less risk in your accounting system.

Risk

With an AP process there are paper risks.

• Time delays with the receiving
• Time delays in the approval process
• Data entry errors
• Transit delays

The above are risk for a system, but they are small risks and their creation is unintentional.

Other Risk – The 4

The most overt risk which is related to fraud that AP Automation can eliminate are:

1. Holding for budget – Invoices that will put a manager over budget or project that people want to hide are easily done with paper. When I first become an automator I was introduced to the “desk drawer” problem. When a manager was fired or quit someone would search their desk and find a stack of invoices… that’s a problem.
2. Vendor’s trickery – Vendors have accounting systems too and they know that if you enter a second invoice with the same invoice number the accounting system will catch it. They also know that if you send in the same invoice with another number they have the opportunity to get paid twice. AP Automation will catch that.
3. Flat out stealing – Several years ago I helped a company catch a theft. It was an accounting person who was ordering furniture from Staples and having it delivered to her home. There are two crimes that needed to be punished, (a) stealing from the company (2) outfitting your home with furniture from Staples. A designated approval process would have prevented this.
4. Safety in number – One of the very overt goals of AP Automation is to make sure that not one… not two… not even three (doing my best Lebron James) people can create a vendor, enter an invoice, approve the invoice for payment and cut a check. When you are automated you can make sure with permissions and routing that it would take anywhere from four to seven people to do this process. The likelihood of defrauding the company with that many people is highly unlikely.

Want to know more? Buy My Books!

To buy the book – The Argument to Automate – How Innovation Can INSPIRE Not Fire – click here to buy

(Also) To get your copy of The 8 Pitfalls of Accounts Payable Automation – click here to buy

How about a children’s book? The Princess and the Paper – click here to buy