Sandwiches and Payables

How many slices of bread do you use to make a sandwich? How many slices of cheese? How much mayo or mustard? What kind of mustard are you using? Is that honey mustard with garlic salt? Are you putting pickles on that? Eggplant?  What are you doing with that eggplant?! We all know what should go on a sandwich and what should not go on a sandwich, correct?

Wrong. You can put an array of different types of food between two pieces of bread. The challenge is deciding what your sandwich should look like. In your AP department, you should know exactly what you want to accomplish when putting all your pieces together. Do you want a spicy Italian sub or do you want a lettuce wrapped salmon delight? How do you answer these questions? Answer: look at the company you are working for first.

What kind of goals does your company have? Do they focus on accuracy or speed? It’s easy to say the overall goals of the company don’t fit into your AP process of entering and paying invoices but stopping when something is “hard” is not how AP functions. The hard part is taking the CEO’s goals and translating them to your own department’s goals.

More food examples: the CEO is having tomato soup for lunch. Are you going to offer them a tuna sandwich or a grilled cheese? The CFO is having salsa and chips for a snack in the afternoon, are you going to offer them bread pudding to go along with it?

Maybe the food examples are a bit of a stretch… how about sports? You want a wide receiver, do you hire the heaviest person on the team? Or the one that moves the fastest? You need to train a quarterback, do you have them do pushups all day or do you have them practice throwing to your new wide receiver?

Now, let’s look at your AP department: the company you work for has a large sales team making deals all day and winning because they can meet the customers needs faster than other companies. The CEO himself calls out to the bullpen on a regular basis and asks “How we doing with sales today? Someone call Mike from Memphis, he mentioned he’s got a great lead!”.

Do you want to burden these salespeople with unnecessary controls just to ensure the system works the way you have always seen it done? Or do you want to engage with your IT group to see how they can help you automate the necessary AP controls without burdening the sales team? Figure out how to create the fewest hand offs for a sale and automate where it would cause delay for sales.

Another example: the CEO has monthly meetings with the whole company. They have a very consistent slideshow of the KPIs the company has hit and where they want the focus to be in future weeks. They have clearly outlined deadlines for every aspect of the company.

Would your AP department have ad hoc practices and flexible deadlines? Create the clearest procedures and show your CEO you are regularly meeting these expectations via KPIs that reflect adherence and consistency. Look into how you can show audit history more easily and ensure consistent results across the board.

Look at your AP department as you would the company’s sandwich. What else is the company eating? What are they allergic to? Do certain aspects of the sandwich cause people to twitch with annoyance. AP is not a ‘one size fits all’ department. There are different kinds of departments inside of an AP department. It’s important to first align the AP department to the company’s existing personality. This builds trust and creates unity across departments thus less friction, then you might be able to get them to try that eggplant and peanut butter sandwich you KNOW they’ll love.