Virtual Event Recap: Bringing AP & AR Together for Smart Business Growth

The COVID-19 pandemic dominated 2020 and affected lives and livelihoods around the world. How suddenly and quickly businesses and their accounting teams had to deal with the economic impacts of COVID is something finance leaders will not forget anytime soon. It’s changed the work of accounting and finance folks and the companies they serve in ways that will only be fully understood years from now.

On July 8th, Esker and a few special quests came together for a virtual finance event to discuss how accounts payable (AP) and accounts receivable (AR) are coming together to create financial transformation and allow for smarter business growth.

Andrew Bartels, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester, discussed the convergence of AP and AR, Christine Harms from the Arizona Cardinals Football Club explained how automating AP and AR through one platform and one partner has benefitted the organization, and Esker Director of Sales Diana Eagen and Chief Operating Officer Emmanuel Oliver provided insight about the top challenges facing finance teams and why companies are turning to automation. Here are some of the topics discussed and some of the most hard-hitting questions asked during the Q&A session! You can also find a link to the event recording here.

Competitive Advantage/Formats:

• Can you speak to why a company would choose Esker vs all the other AP automation players?
• What is your competitive advantage? 
• Does your solution support large implementations (greater than 1 million invoices)? 
• Do you accept invoices in various formats? (EDI, excel, paper, email, flat files, xml)?

Credit Management:

• What are the best ways for companies to determine the creditworthiness of buyers so they can streamline the AR process and avoid collections?
• How do you determine what terms to offer?

Implementation:

• How smooth is the transition from the electronic sales order entry to electronic invoicing?
• My company has mainly gone to automated invoices by EDI and email.  We have customers asking us to upload invoices individually.  What do you think about customers requesting us to upload invoices and match them to their receivers in their web portal?

Multiple ERP Integration:

• All of our AP invoices must be approved via a PO. Does Esker work with Oracle ERP? 
• Would our POs transfer from Oracle to Esker?
• Is this system SAP® compatible?

Interested in what else Esker has going on? Watch the on-demand version of the webinar here and check out our upcoming events.