Across industries, a considerable effort is underway to bring automation into Accounts Payable. No matter a company's specific vertical, everyone has AP processes to look after and manage. It can be hard for even experienced teams to keep up at high volumes and growing scales. Automation tools such as Tungsten Automation AP Essentials provide a robust framework for adapting your specific processes into an environment where humans and computers work to maximize efficiency.

AP Essentials and other Tungsten Automation applications support extendable functionality through solutions found on the Tungsten Marketplace, an online resource anyone can explore. With AP-specific solutions available, how do you find the one that's right for your business? Here's a quick look.

Engage with those close to the process

The marketplace offers several solutions for enhancing Accounts Payable automation, from individual modules to inter-software connectors. The right choices for your business will depend in part on what your employees need to improve the quality of their work. Therefore, the best place to begin is with a conversation involving those closest to the process.

Doing so can give you a clear idea about the pain points your AP team experiences daily. For example, you might discover that teams spend too much time each day typing information from invoices or downloading them from various sources. These time-consuming tasks are necessary, but they aren't the most important steps in the process. Identifying these shortcomings by first engaging your human team naturally leads you to the next step.

Identify where Automation can be a positive force

Some efforts in AP are so nuanced that they must have a human touch for accuracy and reliability. Still, in many other cases, that's not true—a software robot can perform the same job faster and more consistently without stopping. That leaves more time for human workers to engage with those less intuitive efforts. This fact is key for exploring the marketplace and the solutions available there.

In other words, identify the pain points presented in the previous step that would be most easy to address with automation. Once you have a clearly defined idea of the specific steps you need a solution for, you can begin searching in earnest.

Choosing your solutions category on the marketplace

With an idea of what you need to look for, you can fully explore the marketplace. Sorting for solutions is simple based on what you want to find. For example, you can sort solutions by which software package or platform it helps to modify. In this situation, that might mean Tungsten Automation RPA, Tungsten Automation TotalAgility, or AP Essentials, to name a few.

Quickly find relevant solutions for these options and drill down to the items that offer a better working method. Sorting by solution type is also possible when you already know the specific kind of tool you need to get the job done.

What kinds of support can you find here?

Marketplace solutions encompass different tools purpose-built for accomplishing specific and common AP issues. For example, the Marketplace offers many connector options to integrate disparate computer systems into a more unified application. Especially in AP, when data often need to move between multiple systems over the lifetime of a payment, such solutions can offer exceptional value.

One example is the AP Essential Integration Package, which lets you easily build reliable bridges between different systems on the backend. You can structure easy data-sharing between AP Essentials and other resources such as Microsoft SharePoint or your own SQL or Oracle databases.

The result: accurate data transmission with fewer errors due to manual hand-offs and greater visibility into your process. This is just one example of what you can find here.

Quick tips for successful integration and deployment

With simple navigation and detailed descriptions for each solution, we've made it easy to find what you need. Here are a few final tips for making the most of the Marketplace:

• Explore all your options carefully before making a final decision.
• See whether your chosen solution has developer support available; a collaborative approach can yield bigger benefits.
• Test your selections extensively in pre-production environments to identify potential conflicts or problems.
• Monitor your solution for effectiveness once you take it live.

Start exploring marketplace solutions today

We've invested a significant effort into making it straightforward for businesses like yours to find the appropriate solutions on the Tungsten Marketplace. With rich product descriptions, intuitive categories and simple navigation, you can quickly analyze what solutions suit your AP needs closest. By following a well-planned approach to using such solutions, you can put your Accounts Payable teams in a position to be a seriously valuable asset to the whole company. Start your search today.