While very few of us will miss 2020 and are happy with the arrival of 2021, certainly many challenges remain before us. At ICG we are optimistic about the weeks and months ahead and with the proper planning and preparation opportunity abounds. We see three major themes emerging for 2021 and beyond for financial back-office operations:
- Do as much as possible remotely in a secure and compliant fashion;
- Become as efficient as practical – do more with less;
- Drive more processes to a vendor self-service model so your people can focus on value added activities.
With these three themes in mind, let’s look at what tools are at your disposal to help you prepare.
Cloud-hosted portals offer a number of applications and tools that support remote operations, drive efficiencies and help you to promote a secure and successful vendor self-service program. Wherever your responsibilities lie on the procure-to-pay spectrum these tools can help:
- AP Automation – Delivers value, savings, and efficiency. ICG’s cloud hosted Accounts Payable Automation solutions are designed for rapid deployment in a remote processing environment to support business continuity in a highly secure environment.
- Data and Document Capture – Turn everything incoming into actionable data for your back office. Our data & document capture tools are designed to accommodate large and medium sized AP operations who receive a wide variety of invoices/payment demands from multiple sources and in many formats.
- Workflow – Effective business process management (BPM), or more commonly known as workflow, can improve business performance, increase revenue and decrease the amount of time it takes to complete a task.
- Vendor Portal – A Vendor Portal (Supplier Portal) is a web-based, vendor self-service solution that allows you to communicate, collaborate and transact with your vendors in a secure, online environment 24×7.
- AP Vendor Portal – Submit invoices for payment online including PO flip, perform 24 x 7 payment status inquiries, initiate payment and transaction disputes, participate in workflows to update and correct information.
- Dynamic Discounting – Dynamic discounting can save your company millions of dollars by offering discount incentives for suppliers who accept early payments in exchange for a “discount” off of the full payment due. You set the amount and terms of the discount, not the vendor.
- Vendor Onboarding – Vendor onboarding (supplier onboarding) is gathering documents and data needed to set up a company as an approved vendor. It also mitigates risk by providing numerous compliance and validation steps to avoid fraudulent vendors and insure your vendors are healthy and in compliance with all of your requirements and federal, state and local regulations.
- PO Dispatch & Update – This solutions allows you to automatically dispatch purchase orders to the appropriate company and contact. The contact will receive a URL that will allow them to access the PO and perform a number of actions including simply acknowledge receipt of the PO; accept the PO including all terms, conditions and prices; reject the PO with a reason why. Your actions will be communicated back to the buyer. You can also proactively request real-time vendor updates on the status of PO fulfillment.
- ERP & System Integration – ICG is a technology-independent company, which means that we take an agnostic approach when it comes to integrating with your back-end systems. Each of our customers have their own set of back-end financial, line of business, and related ERP systems in place, and we interface our value added solutions with each one. Our ERP-agnostic method allows us to move faster for you and is designed to work with minimal or zero customization required.
ICG can provide you with a full suite of cloud-hosted solutions in a secure, single tenant environment that will allow you to become more efficient, promote remote processing, and facilitate vendor self-service. And even more importantly ICG can provide the experience and expertise to insure you are following best practices. Contact ICG Consulting today for more information, or click here to schedule a demo of one, or all, of our world-class solutions.