Are you seeking a deeper understanding of your AP processes to inform your decision-making with robust data? Optimal functioning of accounts payable is crucial for the overall health of your business. It enables effective cashflow foreasting, maintains positive vendor relationships, and ensures cost control through efficient invoice processing. However, a common challenge for many CFOs and controllers is a lack of clear visibility into the inner workings of their accounts payable departments. This obscurity can hinder the tracking of key performance indicators (KPIs) and identification of process bottlenecks. Without insight into these critical AP metrics, there’s a risk of financial leakage.
Comprehensive accounts payable dashboards are an excellent way for finance leaders to monitor department performance, analyse problems, and keep tabs on key metrics. AP dashboards provide real-time visibility and insights into your invoice processes and transactions – and let you drill down into the data when you need to know more.
This article will explore the importance of AP dashboards in providing detailed, actionable metrics for making well-informed business choices and boosting profitability.
Understanding AP Dashboards
AP dashboards, much like a vehicle's dashboard, offer essential real-time information necessary for monitoring AP processes and transactions, ensuring smooth operation. Kloo's dashboards display key performance indicators (KPIs), alerts, trends, and metrics that illustrate the health and efficacy of your accounts payable processes.
For instance, a dashboard could instantly show a CFO key business intelligence metrics such as:
- Total accounts payable
- Upcoming payable due dates
- Reports on AP team workload
- Outflow cash forecasts
- Spend analysis by department per month/quarter
Equipped with this data, you're positioned to make strategic business decisions, like forecasting working capital, prioritising bill payments, introducing AP automation for workload reduction, or refining procurement to decrease departmental spending.
Key Metrics Tracked by AP Dashboards
Accounts payable dashboards primarily track transaction details and invoice processing performance metrics. This encompasses KPIs and visualisations like invoice ageing charts, invoice lifecycles, vendor details, error rates, and approval durations. By keeping these metrics visible, dashboards ensure complete transparency and insight into the AP process.
Benefits of AP Dashboards
Slow invoice processing can cost your business big. A 2021 survey from Stampli finds that 72% of respondents said they experienced slow internal invoice approvals regularly, with around 34% saying it was their biggest invoice issue.
In the same survey, 23% of respondents said they miss early payment discounts because they are slow paying.
Traditionally, tracking AP metrics involved methods like Excel spreadsheets, accounting software, or even paper ledgers. AP automation systems, which integrate AP dashboards for tracking and metrics, offer significant advantages over these traditional methods, including:
Constant, real-time data visibility
Dashboards show real-time information and KPIs drawn directly from the AP automation system as invoices are being processed. Access to timely insights lets you stay on top of expenditures, make decisions, and manage budgets.
In-depth productivity analysis
By enabling you to dig deep into performance metrics, AP dashboards leverage predictive analytics to help you identify and mitigate bottlenecks to improve processing efficiency and resource management.
Enhanced control over spending
Dashboards provide actionable, real-time aging and vendor balance data. You can use this data to optimise working capital by gaining tighter control over spending and cash flow management.
These benefits lead to optimised human resource utilisation, stronger vendor relations, and an overall healthier financial standing for your business.
Types of AP Dashboards
Rapid business growth can lead to challenges in vendor payments, especially when dealing with a large supplier base. This growth, coupled with increasing invoice volumes, necessitates an AP automation solution to streamline invoice workflows and enhance payment efficiency – all achievable through AP dashboards.
The ideal solution from an AP automation tool would contain dashboards for:
Each dashboard plays a unique role in enhancing visibility and efficiency in your AP processes.
Strategic Accounts Payable Reporting with Kloo’s AP Analytics
Analytics in standard accounting systems are limited, lack depth, and are not always fit for purpose. With AP Analytics, Kloo transforms complex and extensive AP data into focused, actionable insights so you can save time on analytics and reporting for Accounts Payable.
Get back visibility and control over spend with real-time AP dashboards, providing you with historical and predictive reports so you can monitor KPIs to drive improvements as well as plan ahead with outflow forecasting.
Kloo’s AI-powered procurement scorecards allow you to identify inefficiencies to improve your financial health across a variety of metrics: purchase orders, supplier relationship health, outstanding balances, and more.
The best part? Kloo AI is embedded all throughout the dashboards, allowing you convenience and control to query your data and receive actionable next steps in minutes. AP Insights is intuitive, user-friendly, and grants you real-time visibility into your payables, so you can understand your data like never before.
Head to our AP Analytics page to learn more.
