How much time and money are you wasting trying to recruit accounts staff?
Recruiting for your Finance Team is hard because good talent is hard to find. It's no surprise given that job adverts in the UK are high and still rising. According to the REC, job adverts have gone up from 1.5m to 1.8m in the last month alone*. Such a candidate lead market makes recruitment both more difficult, more costly, and more time-consuming, and that’s after you’ve convinced management to let you recruit someone in the first place.
Yet, your business is getting busier. The invoices keep arriving, and your team has less and less time to do the value add activities you want them to, so what’s the next best alternative?
80% of inquiries for Accounts Payable software are triggered by the need for more resource
At Zahara, we’re finding that 8 out of 10 inbound inquiries are driven in part by the need for extra resources as Accounts Teams are finding it hard to handle the workload. They either have a growing number of documents to process as their business grows, or they have lost team members, and replacing them is too difficult, too costly, or both.
Doesn’t our Finance System already process invoices?
Sage, Xero, and QuickBooks, three of the most common Finance Systems in the UK, while powerful tools in their own right, still don’t utilise some of the most time-saving features available. For example, none have an OCR-enabled invoice inbox that can read invoices as they arrive. Nor can they check for duplicates and fraudulent documents automatically. None of them can email the invoices off to managers for approval automatically. Such features are only available in more advanced AP systems, features that have the power to more than half the processing workload, thus eliminating the need to recruit, and can even save you time overall.
Does AP software replace our Finance System?
No, it works alongside it. And once invoices are captured, read, and approved, the accounts payable software will, once connected to your system, post invoices into your finance system as a bill ready to be paid.
We don’t have time to review new software.
A discovery call and a short online demonstration can take as little as 45 minutes. For software that can save your team hundreds of hours, it’s well worth taking the time to have a look. Even if you need to eat your lunch during the call (this has happened to us on a few occasions).
What’s it going to cost?
Cloud based AP software prices are almost always based on the size of your business. For example, Zahara's accounts payable Software offers all the above features and more. It’s available direct or via the Xero app store, and prices start from just £39 per month for up to 100 invoices. A bigger business processing up to 250 invoices a month costing from just under £90 per month. So considerably less than hiring another Accounts person.
