Multitasking, the duck metaphor

Everyone knows what makes an amazing host or hostess. They look like they are taking care of everything for the party, and all the while, their preparations and careful planning is what makes everything seem seamless. I’ve heard others use the duck metaphor.

A duck looks like their effortless skimming across the pond just happens, when in reality, their strong little legs are moving a mile a minute. Their webbed feet are pushing through the water, directing the feathered body gliding above them.

Yup, you guessed it, I’m about to say “this is what your AP department should feel like”.

Those webbed feet are strong and perfectly designed to create the momentum needed to move fast. It’s true that those funny looking, flappy padded toes make amazing paddles. Your AP processors or Data Entry clerks are constantly pushing data through the system, sometimes using either OCR (Optical Character Recognition) or RPA (Robotic Process Automation) technology to create those lines of data for your AP specialists to then pay vendors.

Your AP specialists know which vendors have high demand for customer service and which ones only say ‘show me the money’. Knowing where to put time and effort is what your specialists do best. These directional shifts and changes allow for the department to move in the right direction. It’s the equivalent of ensuring that graceful duck doesn’t run into the dock- cause that is not pretty.

From there, you have your AP leaders who focus on compiling all the information for executives at the company. Knowing which questions they’ll ask and what information will be most beneficial to the business as a whole. These reports are meticulously created with multi-faceted explanations. These leaders are waterproof and help glide the fluffy duck along it’s way. At the end of the day, or the beginning of the meeting, you’ll see all this information compiled and ready to be used in an almost effortless hand off.

It is the effortlessness which can be deceiving. An AP department may have been built to quietly move items along without anyone in the company hearing about the small hiccups. These kinds of departments tend to quietly disappear out of executive’s minds. It’s not causing a problem so it must not need attention. There is no department in a company that doesn’t crave attention or adoration. In the same breath, I would also point out that there are tons of AP departments getting lots of negative attention because one invoice was wrong or paid late.

That one invoice was for a vendor who had very close connections with the CEO. Every other vendor got paid on time, every other invoice was entered correctly- but it’s the one that the CEO hears about that causes a ripple of concern from executives. Remember, when they see the mechanics behind the process as a whole it suddenly becomes much clearer how amazing AP is. This is why people sometimes discount amazing AP teams. They don’t see those powerful orange legs beating constantly even as the duck eats the crackers others offer.

Others may not see it, but you know your department is working hard. Reminding your team, and those who are impacted, how much work is being done to get those payments out once a week is a feat AP seems to pull off swimmingly.