How to Prepare Your AP Department for a Successful 2025

On paper, the equation for accounts payable (AP) is quite straightforward: invoices in, payments out. Easy-peasy — except it’s usually not.

Ask any executive in the building supply space, and they’ll tell you that it’s undoubtedly one of the biggest recurrent headaches they have — right up there with handling rogue suppliers. 

What better time to revamp your AP department than at the beginning of a new year? In case you have any doubts about putting accounts payable at the top of your agenda in 2025, think about all the missed payments, unnecessary delays, and pesky errors your AP team has had to deal with due to lack of a clear plan. Now think about the ripple effect: diminished vendor trust, missed discounts, and so on. The list is endless.

Starting off with comprehensive AP department preparation will ultimately set the tone for smooth operations throughout the year. Here’s to avoiding the all-too-common AP pitfalls and establishing a seamless, cost-effective approach to managing your payments, invoices, and vendor relationships.

Best Practices for AP Department Preparation in 2025

It all comes down to a practical five-step approach.

1. Review and Assess Your Current Processes

Just how rigid are your AP workflows? This step is all about turning the entire invoicing and approvals process upside-down and scrutinizing it for any bottlenecks.

Here are three areas you need to scour:

• Invoice tracking: If you’re still tracking your invoices manually, chances are high that some of them consistently get lost in the shuffle. 
• Approval workflows: Are any hiccups affecting how quickly your accounts payable team can approve invoices? If so, that’s a huge red flag.
• Vendor payments: If you’re consistently struggling to pay vendors on time, the entire schedule needs an overhaul.

The earlier you pick out the inefficiencies, the sooner you can begin crafting a strategy for targeted improvements. 

2. Set Clear Goals for the Year

Now that your workflow assessment is out of the way, it’s time to supply your AP department with clear, actionable goals for the new year. 

Take a look at a few goals worth emulating:

• Cutting down on invoice errors: Set a target for slashing down your data-entry errors by taking advantage of automation. This is where possibilities like AI and electronic documents come into the picture. 
• Training the AP team: Set a deadline for standardizing AP training for your team. That way, you can ensure everyone is working in sync and is well acquainted with today’s best practices.
• Tracking key metrics: Keeping a pulse on vital AP metrics such as invoice processing time and supplier satisfaction levels should be a no-brainer. It’s the only way you’ll understand where the AP department is succeeding and where it’s flopping.

3. Adopt Automation for Routine Tasks

You already have a road map for yearlong AP planning and improvement — call it the “how” piece of the puzzle. Now it’s time for the “what” aspect of it. 

In industries like lumber and building materials, high volumes of transactions are nothing new. But these routine tasks are typically error-prone and time-consuming.

Enter automation.

The goal of AP automation is improving your efficiency across the board. Key tasks that could greatly benefit from automation include:

• Invoice data entry: Manually keying in invoice details is as tedious and error-prone as AP tasks can get. You might want to implement an advanced data capture system that extracts important data points, such as dates and amounts, and instantly sends them to your accounting software. 
• Payment scheduling: Imagine never having to incur late fees or missing out an early-payment discount. That’s the promise of automation. It’ll enable you to schedule payments based on due dates so you never have to play catch-up.
• Approval routing: Think about what you could achieve if your invoices were to move through the necessary channels with zero hiccups. We’re talking about better vendor relationships and smoother AP workflows. Automating approvals through enterprise resource planning (ERP) or AP invoice automation guarantees just that.

4. Train Your Team for Success

Sure, most great tools are easy to use. But when you change the way things are fundamentally done, some team members might get stuck in the weeds. As such, training is crucial to ensure all team members are perfectly aligned with your new processes and tools.

Here’s how you can ensure your team’s transition to the automation era is a resounding success:

• Set up training workshops: Set aside a day or two to allow everyone to freely and fully learn about their new tools, best practices, and workflows. That way, everyone will be clear on their roles and responsibilities. Make this a habit for every new tool you roll out to prevent time and resource wastage.
• Provide educational resources: Video tutorials, training materials, and ongoing education opportunities can help your AP team become adept at utilizing the new processes. Plus, if an issue arises, they can troubleshoot it right away since they'll already have the necessary skills and tech chops.
• Encourage cross-training: If done well, cross-training ensures that your workflows will never come to a frustrating halt when one person is unavailable. 

5. Regularly Monitor Your Progress

Clear, actionable goals? Check. Fully automated workflows? Check. A well-trained team that's raring to go? Double-check. Just one more thing: a conscious, consistent effort to monitor your progress. Without continuous, carefully executed surveillance, even the best plans lose momentum over time.

Schedule periodic check-ins throughout the year to assess how well the AP department is meeting its overarching goals. Here are some questions that can help you monitor your progress:

• Are we consistently and wholly meeting our payment cycle objectives?
• Is automation eradicating errors and speeding up our workflows as envisioned?
• Are team members fully content with the new workflows?

When you gather firsthand feedback from your team, you’ll understand exactly what’s working and what isn’t. What’s more, you’ll be able to nip dissatisfaction and other potential issues in the bud and make the necessary adjustments on the fly. 

Start 2025 Off Right!

Enter 2025 with a bang by partnering with WorldView. We’ve got the solutions (including top-tier AP order acknowledgement automation) you need to simplify your AP workflows and help your team work smarter.

Schedule a demo today.