<i>Accounts Payable Best Practices</i>

Accounts Payable Best Practices
By Mary S. Schaeffer
John Wiley & Sons, US$65

Schaeffer is succinct in her assertion that most businesses take far too cavalier a view of the machinations over at Accounts Payable. There is often a sense that poor to middling AP organizational processes and services have little effect on the bottom line; hence, the development of AP best practices generally sits as a faint scribble at the bottom of most firms' to-do lists.

Curious, since this is where the money is. Of course, any number of AP operational miscues will cut directly and often irretrievably into the bottom line. Hunting down a twice-paid invoice is often the least of a poorly run AP department's worries. Schaeffer, while identifying the newest high-tech innovations in AP controls, offers a series of real-world examples of how companies failed to identify and take earned discounts, were oblivious to special pricing arrangements and cheque fraud. Regulatory factors round out the disaster, as she describes hefty fines and sanctions levied for failing to deal with sales and tax rules. All of the above eroded the firms' bottom lines even further as they dithered about trying to fix these errors.

Her case studies run the gamut from the intricacies of the admittedly mundane master vendor file to Zurich America's highly innovative creation of its own electronic T&E report system. The value of p-card programs--all the rage these days— is minutely dissected to a point where those readers who do not employ such a system will find themselves asking what floor AP is on.

Schaeffer, co-creator of the Accounts Payable Certification Programs, has quite the handle on what may ail an AP department and the likely cures available in the marketplace. To no surprise, she offers the increasingly complex high-tech realm of number-crunching and managing computer program frameworks and the Internet as a key solution. All one needs now is for everyone in the company to take a greater bottom line interest.

-- Rob Colapinto