Thank you for joining me for this hangout on air from Suntico.
Today:
Simple and nifty
Accounts payable process
For your Sage 50
My name is Hugh Johnson. I am head of business development at Suntico. And if you want to get in touch with me after this hangout on air please do via the normal social channels or by email.
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Today's title is
Simple and nifty
Accounts Payable Process
For Sage 50.
We are talking about the fact that a good accounts payable process providing access to information beyond your finance team to join the company together, to join the front office and the back office together perhaps around your Sage 50 accounting data to support greater teamwork to deliver that premium customer service, to deliver those customer smiles back to your business that you deserve.
And that is what Suntico does. And the context today are small to medium sized businesses that use Sage 50 Accounting and employ maybe 10 to 100 people and are business to business in nature doing a lot of regular repeat business with the same sets of customers and in that scenario, at any one time, you can have multiple touch points within your business into a key customer account. For example from finance or sales or customer service or delivery.
And in that scenario it is critical if you are to beat your competition, if you are to deliver that teamwork that the entire team is on the same page and has access to the same information about that key customer and that key customer account.
And that is exactly what Suntico delivers - connected to your Sage 50 accounting software.
Making mistakes may be a good thing in a creative team. However, a good accounts payable process is all about structure, transparency and accountability.
A small weakness in your accounts payable process can create large problems for a small business
SMBs and SMEs can be particularly vulnerable to fraud. In a small business it can be too common for one person to control too much of the procurement process.
Accounts payable process errors can lead to overpayment as a result of inaccurate checking of invoices against orders and deliveries.
Double payment can occur by paying off a statement instead on an invoice
Late payment incurs additional fees and can damage your reputation and standing with the vendor
Any manual queries and irregularities regarding vendor invoice handling adds significant administration costs
Incorrect or duplicate invoices create accounting errors both in your balance sheet and your income statement
Small fast-growing businesses struggle to implement proper systems and processes. Accounts payable systems have historically been quite expensive and difficult to implement.
Good accounting practice proposes the Three Way Match, with different people in your organisation are responsible for the different steps in the accounts payable process.
One person to raise the purchase orders
One person to check goods received against the order
One person to check and authorise the invoice
In this way errors can be caught, and so single person can commit fraud
For a small business using Sage 50, the challenge to implementing a three-way match is that it is hard to connect the people and the data. Purchase quotes, purchase orders, delivery reports and invoices may reside in different forms and different systems.
So, let's take a look at what I mean with a demonstration of Suntico connected to Sage 50 accounting addressing just some of these issues.
What I have prepared for you is a demonstration account called Bellwether Garden Supply, which is a garden supplies company and the financial controller of that company is a fictitious lady called
Delores Flowers and we have project manager within that company also a fictitious guy called Derrick Gross. What we will look at is the interaction between these two people.
Between head office and the mobile worker.
And if you like what you see or are intrigued, because I am only going to touch on a few things, at the end of this hangout on air please go to our website https://www.suntico.com and click on that big red button that says "Try our demo" and that will give you access to the exact same demo account that we are going to take a look at now.