Spotlight on Accounts Payable in your school

Integration and automation can help transform school Accounts Payable from a resource-heavy business necessity to a powerhouse, contributing to great community relationships and improved cash flow.

Our schools are integral parts of our communities. They’re also small to medium service enterprises, managing the same complex business processes that can be found in other businesses or industrial sectors.

Whilst the education of your students may be front and centre; supporting that is an often-invisible activity – Accounts Payable (AP). It’s the people and processes that ensure the pipeline of supplies and services flows to teachers, students and all who enable the day’s learning activities. From the fuel that runs the school bus to food for the canteen, pencils and iPads in classrooms to plumbing and PT equipment, your Accounts Payable team is involved somewhere between procurement and payment.

Schools are facing challenging financial management issues

Education Horizons 2022 School Report found:

School management’s priorities for the year strongly reflected the need for streamlining administrative tasks (50% of respondents) and improving data management (47%).
The technology staff (14% of respondents) noted their top two challenges are managing security risks (55%) and ensuring data security standards were met (42%).
68% of financial management staff in respondent schools reported challenges in generating insightful reports that could help them manage better.

Considering the data represented more than 460 schools and over 1000 respondents across Australia, you shouldn’t feel like the lone ranger if your school’s financial obligations take time and effort.

What improvements are available for Accounts Payable management?

Accounts Payable is often seen as something of a necessary chore. However, the education experts here at FUJIFILM Business Innovation Australia would disagree.

We have decades of experience understanding and implementing workflow automation innovations in the Accounts Payable process in schools all around the country.

From this, we’ve seen first-hand how these advancements can contribute positively to the school’s bottom line and how staff and supplier experiences can be improved. There is also the potential to be able to leverage from automating AP processes for other future workflow automation, such as Human Resources (HR) processes.

We’re also pleased to announce the potential benefits we can offer using new integrations with your TASS or Synergetic school management system.

Here are some of the common AP-related issues we encounter and how our Accounts Payable workflow automation and integrations could help counteract roadblocks and improve your business processes:

Your Accounts Payable Challenge	How our Accounts Payable solution could help
Lack of integration between AP processes and TASS / Synergetic school management systems	Integration with other school systems could help remove the administrative burden of updating multiple systems with the same data. Staff may have more opportunity to focus on other value-added tasks. Posts data across to management systems like TASS and Synergetic and potentially break down data silos.
Concerns about security and privacy of data	Securely scan and index documents electronically before integrating them into the system. Reduces the risk of duplicates. Data could be quality controlled and stored in private or on-premise cloud environments.
Time used to match POs, suppliers and invoices	Automatically submit, receive, exchange and approve invoices with likely reduction of manual intervention, side tracking or delays. No more overflowing in-tray. Potential opportunity for accounts staff to become more involved in other work that could add value to them and the school.
The need for manual entry and clerical errors made by hurried staff
Time taken to chase up approvals
Late fees incurred by overdue payments	Automated payment scheduling could mean prompt payments.
Tension in vendor relationships impacting service provision	Supplier self-service portal potentially leads to less paperwork, shorter processing times and improved payment timelines. It could lead to improved community relationships – and prompt service when it may be needed most.
Providing auditable, transparent transaction histories	The automated AP process flow could reduce opportunities for misuse of funds by providing clear transaction trails and secure storage of information. Secure digitisation could help protect against unauthorised deviations from delegation of authority hierarchies. Find the information you need faster.
Managing cash flow and budgeting in real time	Digitising the AP workflows could provide accessible, real-time financial data to assist with analysing spending trends, managing budgets and alerting you to forward commitments. Generate actionable reports, customisable to your management role.

FUJIFILM Business Innovation Australia has answers

Digitisation and automation are never going to be overnight solutions for every issue. But in the ongoing drive for lowered costs while increasing value for money for the board, the staff and parents, today’s available technology can help overcome many common challenges.

Is your school similar to one of the 77% of survey respondent schools, struggling with management systems and integration challenges? This helpful ‘Accounts Payable Automation for Education’ e-book provides more insights.

Contact us on 13 14 12 to talk with the Education team today to discuss how FUJIFILM Business Innovation Australia may be able to help you streamline and integrate your AP system with other school systems or for more information.