How To Align Accounts Payable with Business Goals in 2025 | Summit

How Finance Managers Can Align Accounts Payable with Business Goals in 2025

As we enter 2025, finance teams are under increasing pressure to not only manage day-to-day operations but also support broader business objectives. For finance managers, a key area to focus on is Accounts Payable (AP)—the processes and systems that govern how an organisation pays its suppliers and vendors. By optimising your AP operations, you can drive efficiencies, identify savings, and ensure that your financial strategy aligns with your company's growth goals.

In this post, we’ll explore five essential strategies for aligning AP with your broader business objectives in 2025.

1. Optimise Cash Flow for Greater Financial Flexibility

Cash flow is the lifeblood of any business. For finance managers, ensuring smooth cash flow is essential for maintaining operations, paying vendors, and supporting business growth.

How to Optimise Cash Flow:

• Automate Invoice Approvals and Payment Processes: Manual invoice processing is not only time-consuming but also prone to errors. By automating invoice approvals and payments, you can ensure that invoices are processed quickly and efficiently, avoiding late fees and missed discounts.
• Optimise Payment Schedules: Strategic payment scheduling allows you to balance cash outflows with inflows. By carefully managing when payments are made, you can avoid unnecessary dips in cash reserves and keep more cash available for business needs.
• Use Cash Flow Forecasting Tools: Accurate cash flow forecasting allows you to predict potential cash shortages or surpluses and take action before a problem arises. Integrated software tools that provide real-time data and projections can help finance teams better plan for the future and avoid cash flow issues.

Optimising cash flow allows you to better manage working capital and provides the financial flexibility needed to support strategic initiatives, whether it’s pursuing new opportunities, expanding your business, or improving profitability.

2. Uncover Savings Opportunities through Spend Visibility

Finance managers are constantly looking for ways to reduce costs and improve profitability. By diving into your AP data and spend patterns, you can uncover valuable savings opportunities that directly impact your bottom line.

How to Find Savings Opportunities:

• Review Payment Terms with Vendors: By renegotiating payment terms with key suppliers, you can unlock early payment discounts or extended payment windows. These small adjustments can make a big difference in your overall cash flow and savings.
• Consolidate Vendors and Streamline Contracts: Having too many suppliers can lead to inefficiencies and higher administrative costs. Consolidating your supplier base and negotiating better terms with fewer vendors can simplify processes and reduce costs. Additionally, standardising contracts can help streamline approvals and payments.
• Leverage Spend Analytics: Advanced spend analytics tools can provide a detailed view of your company’s purchasing patterns. These tools can help you identify opportunities for cost savings, such as finding lower-cost suppliers or reducing maverick spending (spending outside of approved channels).

Identifying and capturing savings through your AP process not only improves cash flow but also supports broader cost-reduction efforts within the organisation.

3. Free Up Time to Focus on Strategic Growth

Finance teams are often bogged down with repetitive and time-consuming tasks like manual data entry, invoice processing, and payment approvals. By automating these processes, you can free up time to focus on higher-value, strategic initiatives that drive business growth.

How to Free Up Time for Growth:

• Automate Routine AP Tasks: Automation tools can handle repetitive tasks like data entry, invoice matching, and payment scheduling. This reduces manual work, minimises human error, and accelerates invoice processing times.
• Shift Focus to Analysis and Decision-Making: With routine tasks automated, you and your team can spend more time analysing spending patterns, forecasting budgets, and exploring new financial opportunities. The time saved can also be invested in advising senior leadership on financial strategy or helping identify business growth areas.
• Empower Your Team for High-Value Work: By giving your finance team the tools and resources to automate routine tasks, you empower them to become strategic partners in the business, contributing to innovation and growth.

Freeing up time for strategic work enables you to shift from being a reactive, transactional team to a proactive, value-driven one.

4. Foster Cross-Department Collaboration to Align Priorities

AP processes don’t operate in a vacuum. Finance teams must work closely with procurement, sales, and other departments to ensure that AP practices are aligned with overall business priorities. Strong collaboration helps streamline processes, reduce errors, and support agile business decisions.

How to Foster Collaboration:

• Standardise AP Workflows Across Departments: By creating a standardised workflow for all departments involved in purchasing and payments, you ensure consistency and transparency throughout the process. This reduces bottlenecks, improves communication, and minimises the chances of errors.
• Implement Collaborative Tools: Cloud-based solutions and communication tools can facilitate collaboration between finance, procurement, and other departments. With these tools, team members can work together on approvals, track the status of payments, and share critical information in real-time.
• Ensure Alignment on Business Priorities: Regular meetings between finance, procurement, and business leadership can ensure that everyone is aligned on the company’s financial priorities. This can help avoid conflict or confusion over spending decisions and create a more agile response to changing business needs.

Fostering cross-department collaboration is key to ensuring that AP processes contribute to your company’s broader goals, whether it’s reducing costs, improving operational efficiency, or supporting business growth.

5. Leverage Technology for Data-Driven Insights

In today’s fast-paced business environment, relying on gut feeling or outdated spreadsheets is no longer enough. To make smarter financial decisions, finance managers need access to real-time data and analytics.

How to Leverage Technology for Insights:

• Invest in Real-Time Reporting Tools: Real-time reporting tools provide an up-to-date view of your cash flow, outstanding invoices, and vendor performance. This helps you make informed decisions quickly and avoid surprises at month-end or quarter-end.
• Use Automation for Reporting: Automating financial reports allows for more timely and accurate insights, reducing the manual effort required for data analysis. Automation can also help you track key metrics, such as cash flow, ageing payables, and vendor performance, at the touch of a button.
• Analyse Vendor Performance and Spending Trends: Spend analysis tools can help you identify which vendors provide the best value and where you might be overspending. Analysing these patterns allows you to optimise future budgets and make more informed purchasing decisions.

Using technology to gather and analyse data not only improves decision-making but also helps you stay agile and responsive to changing business needs.

Final Thoughts: Make 2025 a Year of Smarter AP

Aligning your AP processes with broader business goals is crucial for driving efficiency, reducing costs, and supporting growth in 2025. By optimising cash flow, uncovering savings opportunities, automating routine tasks, fostering collaboration, and leveraging technology, finance managers can make a tangible impact on their organisation’s financial health and overall performance.

Take the time this year to evaluate your AP processes, invest in automation tools, and collaborate closely with other departments. The result? A more strategic, efficient, and future-ready finance team.

Ready to take your AP processes to the next level? Explore Summit’s solutions to automate and optimise spend management for better results in 2025. Contact us for a demo or more information.