How to Boost Efficiency in Your K–12 Business Office with AP Automation

So much of education is moving digital—textbooks, grade cards, and even field trips. But many business offices rely heavily on moving paper from one location to another.

As it becomes more important to have accurate and current data on your expenses and revenue, it’s critical that K–12 business offices incorporate automation in areas such as accounts payable.

By automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks, AP automation helps your K–12 business office save time, improve your audit trail, maintain internal controls, and mitigate fraud. Not to mention cut back on some of that paper.

Here’s a breakdown of each of those benefits for your school.

Streamlined Payment Workflows Save Time

The biggest benefit of AP automation for your business office is the time your staff will save—followed closely by the improved accuracy of your data from eliminating so many manual tasks. 

An automated payments system moves an invoice from approved to paid quickly and with only the necessary human interaction. It reduces the need to match invoices to expenses because the system does it automatically. Most automated payments systems can match up to 60% of expected invoices. But an automated payments solution in your fund accounting system creates the payments from the invoices, so there is no manual matching required.

You pay invoices with a few clicks, which leaves more time for your team to focus on strategic work—like cleaning up your vendor records or reviewing tuition forecasts.

Many AP automation solutions require a third-party agreement. While that can still save you time, Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT® users have Payment Assistant™ available directly within the system you use every day.

One Step Closer to a Paperless Finance Office

If you are like many private K–12 schools, you could build rooms with the boxes of paper stored throughout your campus. But it’s hard to make quick decisions about cash flow if you are waiting for a paper invoice approval to get routed back to you via inter-campus mail.

If moving your business office processes to a paperless system is a goal of yours, AP automation is a simple first step. The automated payable system handles getting payments to your vendors in the format they prefer, so you can eliminate the cost and hassle of paper checks.

Plus, electronic document management gives you access to all the details you need and provides a better audit trail. No more sifting through another box looking for the purchase request for the smartboards that your IT team installed three years ago.

Stronger Internal Controls

Having a small finance team often makes it hard to incorporate good internal controls, like separation of duties. When you only have a CFO, controller, and one staff accountant, it’s likely that you might have one person entering invoices, approving payments, or reconciling journal entries, especially if someone is out sick or on vacation.

Automated payments add another layer of separation between approving expenses and cutting checks. Invoices still go through your standard approval processes, so you have a clear audit trail. The added layer of separation with an automated payments system helps prevent fraud and helps minimize errors.

Improved Vendor Management and Fraud Mitigation

Automated payments can also help make sure your vendors are paid on time and with the payment method they prefer. Once you’ve enrolled the vendors you’d like to include in your AP automation, your vendors choose the payment process that works best for them, whether that’s virtual card payments, checks sent from the automated payment provider, an ACH transaction, or a credit card payment.

The system will also follow up on undeposited checks or returns, verifying a change in address or payment information. Because you use a custodial account for your payments to flow through, your account information isn’t sitting in a mailbox or on someone’s desk waiting to be stolen. And shorter reconciliation time means you identify issues faster before they become major headaches.

Berwick Academy: Saving Time and Easier Access to Information

Berwick Academy is the oldest independent school in Maine and serves students from pre-kindergarten to 12^th grade. The school has a long history of embracing technology and was already using automated payments through a third-party. But when Seth Hurd, the Controller and Director of Information Systems, learned that Blackbaud was launching AP automation within Financial Edge NXT, he wanted to learn more.

After doing a few initial tests of Payment Assistant, Hurd found that because the tool was within Financial Edge NXT, it put all the information needed for vendor payments in one place so it was faster and easier to access information. For a task like pulling a check for a vendor, which used to consume a good deal of time, they were now able to complete in just a few clicks.

“We cut the other platform loose and went all in with Payment Assistant,” said Hurd. “Just by doing that switch, I cut my workload in half. Because Payment Assistant is in-product, I don’t have to export anything, I don’t have to run two sets of reports, I don’t have to reconcile. The same goes for the approval process for my CFO—since the tool is in-product, he’s already in there looking at the balance sheet and doesn’t have to log into another product. Everything is built right in, and not having all those additional steps anymore saves time. It’s absolutely been a huge time saver.”

Save Your Business Office Time and Headache with Payment Assistant

Accounts payable is one of the most manual parts of your business office’s workload. According to the AFP’s 2022 Payments Cost Benefit Survey, most finance professionals spend more than 150 hours—almost 19 business days—each year on AP processes. 

With automated payments available within Financial Edge NXT, you can eliminate many of those manual tasks so you can focus on more strategic planning, like forecasting and evaluating new revenue streams.

Ready to automate your AP processes? Check out our website to learn more about Payment Assistant.