3 Challenges Accountants Face and How To Solve Them Like a Pro
Complex company structures, increasing compliance, data privacy concerns, and outdated legacy systems are all too familiar in the accounting profession. If you’re one of the 1.4 million accountants in the United States dealing with these and other challenges, your already hectic role can feel—well—unnecessarily daunting.
You likely spend a lot of time looking for solutions to lighten your load while preserving the control you need to be effective. Good news! Solving these and other challenges like a pro is closer than you think.
Accounting Today’s interview with Stampli’s CEO, Eyal, uncovered how to solve these common challenges without re-engineering your processes. Here’s what Eyal shared.
Three Key Challenges Accountants Continually Face
Ongoing uncertainty complicates where to focus your efforts. Like other accountants, you likely struggle with these three key concerns:
- Increasingly complex company structures
- Non-stop compliance requirements
- Legacy accounting systems that impede efficiency
How do you address key challenges?
Having an efficient and adaptable solution that emphasizes human validation in workflows and real-time data helps meet changing company demands, ensures compliance, and better supports accounting functions.
Addressing the three challenges requires a modern approach to AP. Accounts Payable (AP) managers and accountants can simplify and centralize AP workflows, interactions, and documentation and automate tasks for complete visibility and control—but with a more human-centric approach.
Let’s take a closer look at how Eyal says this can be achieved.
Simplifying workflows in complex company structures
Let’s face it: you can’t slow the pace of change. That train has left the station. As an accountant, keeping up with change isn’t a want—it’s a need, especially in a complex company structure. You need ways to cost-effectively simplify your AP workflows, expedite payments, maintain control, and reduce disruption.
Eyal says, based on customer feedback, a well-balanced mix of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology and human oversight is vital. Your workflows should center around invoices, with AI handling the manual AP tasks like coding and routing. “Our AI automates nearly all of the capture, coding, routing, fraud detection, and manual tasks.” He says incorporating AI helps you streamline manual tasks—but you need a human-in-the-loop to verify outputs and ensure accountability and accuracy.
Having more payment options is important. When vendors use credit cards to pay invoices, you can enforce company policies through set spending limits, MCC codes, approvals, and other controls and sync immediately with ERP systems. It’s something vendors really appreciate, explains Eyal.
Stepping it up to meet compliance
Compliance, compliance, and more compliance. It seems every other week, you’re hearing about a new regulatory and reporting requirement. Your plate is already full, and it just feels too overwhelming at times.
If your company’s documents, communications, and data are siloed, remaining compliant can feel like trying to shovel water. No matter what you do, you can’t get a handle on everything. It’s something Eyal understands. “We completely centralize AP, so you don’t need workarounds, spreadsheets, or manual work in the ERP.” Centralizing AP allows your company to set standardized processes and internal control policies to ensure compliance with current accounting standards. Centralization creates a single source of truth. Removing silos decreases compliance challenges and risks by eliminating blindspots, versioning issues, and other problems that require manual workarounds—further complicating matters. Without silos, it’s easier and faster to isolate, drill down, and analyze transactions, reducing the chance of data manipulation and fraud.
Integration with other fintech solutions is also a must-have in ensuring compliance, especially when dealing with security, reliability, and compliance issues. “We regularly roll out new ERP API integrations, and we’ve recently released SAP S4HANA & SAP ECC, Oracle Fusion, Acumatica, and Sage CRE. In fact, we’re a Sage Recommended Solution and work especially well with Sage Intacct,” Eyal told Accounting Today.
Modernizing your existing accounting systems for efficiency
Most CFOs and CPAs cringe at the mere mention of the words “new accounting solution.” Automating your company’s AP software doesn’t need to invoke panic. You may be pleasantly surprised to know that your AP processes and integration with other systems don’t need to be an all-or-nothing or lengthy approach. You can keep your existing accounting systems and rapidly deploy modern customized functionality that centers workflows and interactions around invoices.
The key is Stampli’s approach to ERP integration. “We aren’t aware of any other AP automation software with a philosophy to build its own ERP integrations from scratch,” explains Eyal—and it’s well suited for businesses with complex multi-entity corporate structures. If you’re using other third-party integrations, they rarely encompass the full native functionality of the ERPs, and you are beholden to the schedules of their integrators to address customer requests or bug fixes.
Solving these challenges like a pro requires AP automation with integrated payments and credit cards. It’s perfect if your company needs to manage its invoices more efficiently without reworking or overhauling current processes.
What’s the Stampli secret to AP Efficiency?
Eyal says it’s really quite simple: Stampli’s deeper knowledge of your ERP integrations ensures better AP integrations than competitors offer—without the need to even touch your ERP system.
“Stampli does everything in-house—leading to easier setup, implementation, and onboarding” by:
- Delving deep and wide into how your business uses its ERP.
- Exploring your company’s inner workings to ensure that APIs support your ERP’s full functionality—even when a clear or simple solution seems impossible.
- Prioritizing responses to your requests. Stampli specifically hires people with finance and accounts payable backgrounds, so you have confidence that you’re speaking with someone who understands your business, your function, and especially your ERP.
Our approach leads to integrations that are fully adaptable to any given business structure.
As your company grows and its structure becomes more complex, so will its compliance requirements, making it difficult for legacy systems to keep up. By modernizing your AP system, you’re prepared to face your biggest challenges like a pro.
Find out more about AI-powered Accounts Payable automation that is fully adaptable to any given business structure.
