What Equipment Rental Companies Need to Know About Automating Accounts Payable

Arielle Cox

Accounts Payable involves a number of manual workflows – from creating purchase orders and entering invoices to cutting checks and routing documents for approval. Even with rental software helping you streamline and standardize your accounting processes, AP still brings about several repetitive tasks for your team to stay on top of.

AP automation helps you take the manual effort out of your procure-to-pay process. These solutions let you:

• Automatically import invoices using OCR (optical character recognition) instead of entering them manually
• Automatically match purchase orders, invoices, and receipts
• Automatically route purchase orders and invoices to assigned approvers based on department, location, and/or dollar amount

At InTempo, we’ve integrated our rental ERP with several AP automation solutions, including IntelliChief, Square 9, and Concur. These integrations allow you to create purchase orders; complete a three-way match; process and pay PO- and non-PO based invoices; send the payment data back to InTempo; and process the disbursement to close the loop in your General Ledger. You don’t have to change your purchasing process; instead, our integrations let you bring data in and out of InTempo’s accounting module. Sync once a day, twice a day, or more frequently based on your accounting team’s specific needs.

The vendor information you’re already capturing in InTempo flows directly into your AP automation solution, which will validate the data against your existing records. It’ll confirm that you already have the vendor set up in your ERP; that each purchase order is tied to a valid GL number; and that each payment that you issue matches the amount of the original invoice. This reduces the chances of an accidental error and lets your team spend their time on the rest of your day-to-day accounting work.

The Need for a Rental-Specific AP Automation Solution

As you’ve likely already figured out – the rental industry involves so many unique processes that non-specialized point solutions may not be able to handle your established workflows. Most AP automation solutions are built to be industry-agnostic, which means that they may not work out-of-the-box for complex processes, such as re-rentals and the many recurring purchase orders that they generate.

This is where it can be helpful to partner with a solutions vendor that’s already familiar with the rental industry. Instead of having to re-work processes that you’ve created to support your unique business, you can have your automation solution tailored to your exact processes.

What a Successful AP Automation Project Can Do for Your Rental Business

When correctly configured to the needs of your rental business, AP automation can help you save thousands of dollars – and hundreds of hours of time – over the course of a year.

Generally speaking: the higher the volume of invoices that you process, the higher your ROI. Similarly – if you have multiple people who interact with each invoice before it’s approved for payment, or if you often yourselves trying to hunt down lost or misplaced invoices, you stand to benefit more from automation.

There’s another financial incentive to consider in the form of early pay discounts. Many vendors offer incentives (such as a 1-3 percent discount) for customers who can pay their invoices in a certain time frame (i.e., 15 or 30 days). Manual processing can make it difficult to hit these deadlines, but when you’re automating the most time-consuming steps, you can more of these discounts and keep more of your hard-earned revenue.

Learn More about AP Automation for the Rental Industry

Want to take a deeper dive into how AP automation works with InTempo’s rental accounting software? Check out this session from the 2024 InTempo Enterprise User Conference:

Interested in talking about an AP automation integration for your equipment rental business? Contact us and we’ll connect you with a member of our team.