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Accounts Payable Best Practices
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outgoing fax transmissions. Also, since it is only used for one purpose, it is
unlikely that incoming faxes will be mistakenly taken to other departments. To
make this system work even better, the accounting manager should look into get-
ting a fax rerouting capability that sends incoming faxes to an electronic mailbox
if the fax machine is busy, with transmission occurring as soon as the fax
machine is available to receive new incoming transmissions. This service is inex-
pensive and ensures that all documents sent are received.
There are few disadvantages to this best practice. It requires a separate phone
line for the fax machine, a fax rerouting capability that is nothing more than a
voice mailbox for faxes, and a fax machine. However, none of these requirements
are expensive. Also, there is a slight risk that some faxes will not be sent correctly
or will be lost in transmission. In these cases, it may be possible to generate a
custom report from the accounting software that lists all missing documents
needed to process various accounts payable transactions. The accounting staff
can use this report to fax out requests to subsidiaries for missing documents, so
that anything that was lost on the first transmission attempt can be sent again. On
the whole, this is an easy best practice to implement for those organizations that
use centralized processing of accounts payable for multiple company locations.
Cost: Installation time:

3–9 HAVE SUPPLIERS INCLUDE THEIR SUPPLIER
NUMBERS ON INVOICES

The typical vendor database includes listings for thousands of suppliers. Every
time an invoice arrives from a supplier, the accounts payable staff must scroll
through the list to determine the vendor code for each one. If there are similar
names for different suppliers, or multiple locations for the same one, it is quite
likely that the resulting check payments will go astray, leading to lots of extra
time to sort through who should have been paid. This basic problem can be par-
tially resolved by having suppliers include the supplier number, as created by the
company’s accounting system, on their invoices. The easiest way to do so is to
mail out a change-of-address form to all suppliers, listing the same company
address, but also noting as part of the address an “accounts payable code” that
includes the supplier number. Suppliers will gladly add this line to the mailing
address to which they send their invoices, since they think it is a routing code that
will expedite payment to them (which, in a way, it will). Some follow-up may be
necessary to ensure that all suppliers adopt this extra address line. Even if not all
of the suppliers elect to make the change, there will still be an increase in effi-
ciency caused by those that have done so.
There are two problems with this approach. One is that the change of address
mailing cannot be a bulk mailing of the same letter, since each letter must include
the supplier code that is unique to each recipient. This will call for a mail merge