Take control of NetSuite payment management with AP automation

Making vendor payments can be expensive and time-consuming. Although NetSuite can expedite the financial processes around payments, accounting teams often need to jump between different payment processes and systems to pay vendor bills. The result is a mishmash of inefficient, error-prone manual processes that slow down the payment process – resulting in late payment fees, costly errors, and upset vendors.

Oracle NetSuite customers can leverage accounts payable automation to optimize payment processing workflows. By choosing the right AP automation solution, businesses can augment NetSuite’s functionality to take control of their P2P workflows and combine multiple payment processes into a single solution. Payment automation in NetSuite lets businesses access more payment options, pay vendors quickly, improve cash management, and get the most out of their NetSuite investment.

In this article, we dive into the NetSuite P2P process to take a closer look at how AP automation can optimize vendor payments workflow in NetSuite.

How to automate vendor payment processing in NetSuite ERP

Businesses that use manual processes for vendor payments usually follow a basic workflow. The general stages of the workflow are as follows:

• Vendors send invoices to Accounts Payable
• Accounts Payable enters the invoices into the accounting system and adds GL codes to line items.
• AP matches the invoices to purchase orders and forwards them for approval.
• Approvers confirm the invoices and send them to Finance for payment.
• The Finance department ensures there is cash available to pay the invoices, then queues them for payment.
• Finance pays the invoices by check, ACH, electronic payment, credit card, or another payment method according to the vendor contract terms.

In a NetSuite ERP environment, the various teams in the payment workflow will manually update the transaction data in NetSuite during the process. In general, businesses have several payment options within NetSuite:

Manual payment in NetSuite

You can pay vendor bills manually within NetSuite Accounts Payable by navigating to the Transactions > Payables menu and selecting the type of transaction you want to make. You can choose to pay a single or multiple bills via ACH or check. Once the bill is paid, NetSuite posts the transaction in the general ledger, and the amount is deducted from the accounts payable balance.

Payments through Electronic Bank Payments

NetSuite comes with built-in NetSuite Payment Management functionality. Businesses can use it along with the Electronic Bank Payments module to make electronic funds transfers (EFTs) to vendors via ACH, direct deposit, and other methods. However, the Electronic Bank Payments module has limited functionality. To gain access to features such as multi-currency processing and automated payment batch creation, businesses must subscribe to the advanced module.

Payments via NetSuite Applications Suite (SuiteApps)

NetSuite SuiteApps are third-party solutions that integrate with NetSuite to provide vendor payment functionality. Different payment SuiteApps work in different ways, but generally, businesses make payments by subscribing to the SuiteApp and then selecting the payment solution when making payments within NetSuite. Some SuiteApps, such as Stampli, integrate closely with NetSuite to synchronize transaction data and vendor information in real time, ensuring high visibility and control over payments.

Despite its advantages, NetSuite’s payment workflow can be slow and inefficient if the business hasn’t fully optimized its accounts payable processes. Data is often manually entered into NetSuite, which makes the business vulnerable to fraud and data entry errors. Financial automation streamlines AP processes like payment workflows, and automatically syncs with NetSuite to make payments more accurate. But that’s not all – payment automation has many other benefits to businesses.

Key benefits of NetSuite accounts payable and payments integration

In Stampli’s white paper, AP in 2023: Expectations, Technology, Opportunity, 72% of finance leaders reported that they expected to use electronic payments more frequently. Over a quarter (27%) expected a significant increase in how often they made electronic payments. This seismic shift in payment methods means businesses will be looking for ways to streamline how they handle digital payments – including moving away from manual check-based payment methods.

Accounts payable platforms facilitate electronic payments by centralizing payment methods to a single platform and synchronizing payment data with ERPs. Automating payment processing ensures that AP and finance teams can access up-to-date data on payment terms, bank account information, vendor payment details, and discounts and credits.

AP automation not only helps businesses realize significant cost savings, but it also has some other tangible benefits for business:

Centralizing payment methods improves efficiency

Making payments using disconnected payment systems is slow and error-prone, and can cause late or missed payments. Moving to a payment automation platform replaces multiple disconnected payment methods with a single method to process payments. Centralizing payments makes it simple to manage vendor preferences and make payments in multiple locations and currencies.

One Stampli customer describes how implementing Stampli has simplified bill payment in NetSuite: “Provides a single source of receiving and processing ALL of our bills into one platform and syncing with NetSuite. We no longer have ’exceptions’ with our complicated processes that a platform cannot handle. If Stampli cannot handle it by it native features alone, there are simple workarounds that have been able to work out perfectly. No expensive customizations or bypassing of their system is required.”

Efficient and error-free account reconciliation

Manually reconciling vendor bills to your bank account in NetSuite is tedious and can lead to accounting errors. Integrated payment automation solutions automatically collect and synchronize invoice and transaction data with NetSuite to create a single source of truth. Accounting and finance teams gain full real-time visibility into transactions at every stage of the P2P process.

NetSuite and many payment processing systems batch ACH transactions, making reconciliation a difficult, manual process. Stampli Direct Pay simplifies ACH reconciliations by providing detailed bank statements & remittance information that lets you track transactions individually.

A Stampli customer in construction shares how it has helped simplify their accounting processes: “So many good things to say about Stampli: Ease of Implementation, Integration, and very responsive support team! Also very quick in customizing a report for Positive Pay to match our banks needs…Especially appreciate the ACH payment process, the transactions post to our bank as individual transactions and not as a daily batch total which makes bank reconciliation fast and simple.”

Cost-effective implementation maximizes NetSuite investment

NetSuite represents a significant investment. Choosing the right payment processing system maximizes that investment by reducing costs and supporting future business growth without compromising how you run NetSuite today.

Many third-party financial automation solutions don’t support NetSuite’s full functionality, forcing you to compromise on how you run NetSuite today or invest in expensive IT rework. Stampli’s pre-built NetSuite integration supports NetSuite’s full native functionality without the need to rework your existing workflows. You won’t have to change anything in NetSuite today, and you won’t be constrained from changing anything in the future.

“Stampli Integration with NetSuite is Great!” says an accounting supervisor on TrustRadius. They went on to describe how integrating Stampli with NetSuite has transformed their ability to pay vendors: “We use Stampli to process all invoices and credit memos into our ERP. It matches things very well and integrates with very little issues. The time-consuming check printing problem is now out of our hands! This is a huge plus allowing staff to move onto other more important tasks.

We recently added DirectPay. This add on has allowed us to improve our AP processing time and the Option of ACH payments to our vendors is a huge plus! No more delayed USPS mail wait times or missing checks to replace!”

Improved risk management

Financial automation platforms provide CFOs and controllers with greater visibility and control over AP processes, making it easier to detect and prevent fraud and errors. By enforcing internal controls like segregation of duties and maintaining a complete AP audit trail, automation helps you avoid missed or erroneous payments.

Stampli provides exceptional risk management by leveraging AI and machine learning to improve invoice processing accuracy and fraud detection. It synchronizes live purchase order and invoice data with NetSuite to facilitate accurate three-way matching, providing a strong defense against fraud.

“Stamplii has been a game-changer for our finance operations. It has significantly streamlined our Accounts Payable process, making it more efficient and error-free,” says a Stampli customer. “The tool automatically processes invoices, identifies duplicates, and matches them to purchase orders. This has greatly reduced the risk of human error and ensured accurate and timely payments.”

Data-Supported business decisions

Automation platforms that synchronize data with Netsuite help CFOs and finance leaders make informed business decisions. They provide data, analytics, and forecasting to give you better visibility into invoice status and better control over cash flow and expenditures.

By seamlessly synchronizing real-time information with NetSuite, Stampli gives finance leaders timely and actionable insights into AP processes. Stampli Insights provides comprehensive live AP reports and presents key metrics in visual dashboards — letting you check AP performance at a glance.

One Stampli customer shares how Stampli’s reporting features help their leadership make informed decisions: “It holds individuals throughout our company accountable for their reviewing and approving Invoices. We can easily manage coorespondence. Track invoices that are past due. Pull everything into one nice neat report to review with our users.

The reports make a great resource to share with GMs that can quickly review what vendors or invoices that may be causing holds for our company. CORRESPONDING within Stampli vs multitiudes of emails, team chats and phone calls is THE BEST!”

Better scalability to support growth

Fast-growing businesses invest in NetSuite because they need an ERP that grows with them. Leading integrated payment automation platforms augment NetSuite’s capabilities by handling increased invoice volumes, more complex invoices, global expansion, and multi-location, entity, and subsidiary scenarios.

Although integrated solutions have the potential to support business growth, businesses are often reluctant to pay a lot for a solution that limits their use of NetSuite. Stampli protects your NetSuite investment now and in the future. It supports NetSuite’s full functionality and is committed to supporting all fields, functionality, and use cases in the future.

“My finance team knows how much I love Stampli because I sing its praises so often,” says the AP manager at a fast-growing startup. “We recently outgrew our old system and needed to look for something affordable and scalable that would interrupt our day-to-day operations as little as possible. That’s when we found Stampli. It’s incredibly easy to use, allows me to keep up with A/P on my own thanks to my buddy Billy the Bot. Implementation was quick and quite easy, and while we don’t run into problems often, customer support is always super fast to respond and kind to explain what’s happening and how to resolve it.

Stampli is helping me streamline the PO billing process. Our old A/P system did not pull PO information from our ERP, whereas Stampli does and cuts out an extra time-consuming step or two.”

Integrating a payment automation solution helps businesses get the most out of their NetSuite ERP. However, to realize many of the benefits of automation, the integration between the automation platform and NetSuite must be efficient and accurate. It’s crucial to select a payment solution that seamlessly integrates with NetSuite to provide optimal collaboration and data sharing across the P2P process.

Streamline NetSuite payment management with Stampli Direct Pay

NetSuite customers need powerful and efficient payment functionality backed by a capable, experienced AP solution provider to leverage NetSuite and optimize their vendor payment workflows fully. With a proven track record of successful NetSuite implementations and Built for NetSuite certification, Stampli is the ideal financial automation partner.

Stampli is the leading financial automation platform built for how AP teams work. Its AP automation and payment solutions provide next-generation capabilities backed by Stampli’s proven industry-leading expertise and experience. Stampli Direct Pay and Stampli Card easily integrate with NetSuite, support multiple options, locations, and currencies, provide centralized communications and collaboration, and are supported by Stampli’s award-winning implementation team.

Stampli’s payment solutions give you total control and transparency over vendor management, payment processing, and corporate card spending. Here are just a few of the advantages of using Stampli to manage your payments:

• Payment visibility and control: Purchases made with Direct Pay and Stampli Card are automatically synced in NetSuite as a payment receipt, allowing full control over card transactions.
• Payment agnostic: Choose your payment method. Make payments instantly with Stampli Card or by ACH, direct debit, check or other methods.
• Ensure data security: Stampli is compliant with NetSuite token-based authentication, so your data is always safe and secure.
• Full spending control: Stampli Card lets you control spending by limits, usage types, vendors, and more.
• Real-Time insights: Stampli collects transactional data and automatically live syncs it with NetSuite to provide timely and accurate data across the organization.
• Centralized communications: Stampli breaks down silos by centering interdepartmental communication on top of the digital invoice, facilitating collaboration, accountability, and information flow.
• Invoice processing: Stampli provides a single filterable view for all invoice, bill, and expense types and supports many-to-many filtering across interconnected fields in NetSuite.

“An amazing solution!”

One financial controller and long-time Stampli customer calls Stampli “An amazing solution!” and goes on to say, “We have been using Stampli for close to three years now, and we’ve literally had zero issues. The connection with Netsuite is seamless, any updates/upgrades we want to do are easy to implement and everyone in the company is very happy with the approval process.

Overall, it’s a great product that does exactly what’s advertised – Make the AP function more efficient and easier for everyone!

Finally, in the odd occasions where we needed some customer support (for trivial issues), I couldn’t have asked for a better team. They were always helpful, quick to reply and very accommodating!”

A G2 Grid Accounts Payable Leader recognized for exceptional implementation, customer relationships, and delivering results, Stampli is the clear choice for flexible and powerful payment management for your NetSuite ERP. Contact our team today to set up a free demo of Stampli Direct Pay and see how to get the most out of NetSuite.