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A new approach to Accounts Payables for Construction.

Every industry has its own challenges. In construction, these come from decentralised bases of operation, staggering numbers of invoices, and the manpower required to process them—all of this creating bottlenecks and risks of error in accounts payable.  

Zahara is here to fix this for you. Our accounts payable software is uniquely suited to construction firms in that it solves a lot of problems that are built (no pun intended) into the industry. In this article we’ll have a look at what those challenges are, and how Zahara can help.  

Construction: Accounts Payable is a pain point.  

Handling invoices the old way (manually) opens construction firms up to risks. These are:  

Labour-intensive manual invoice processing  

• Construction is an invoice-heavy industry, and all these invoices require hands and heads for processing. It’s tiring work, probably not as tiring as humping your materials around a building site, but tiring nonetheless.  
• Tired workers make mistakes. Invoices are lost or misfiled, suppliers don’t get paid, projects are stalled. If it hasn’t happened yet, the risk still looms.  
• Manual processing also leads to bottlenecks that create awkward lags in accounts payable, as well as in the ability to see the full picture of your committed spends.  

Complex, decentralised operations  

• You’ve got multiple projects running at once, each with their own challenges, costs and crews. That makes for complex operations. Your finance dept. handles stacks of invoices from multiple locations with differing needs. It gets complex. 
• The high costs involved in construction naturally require a robust approvals system, but that adds yet more complexity.   

Cost tracking  

• We’re willing to guess your business software only lets you look back at your spends. That gives you a good read on your sunk costs, but not the ability to see how costs stand as a project goes on. In such a purchase-heavy industry this makes it easy for costs to skyrocket and budgets to swell.  

Difficult delayed payments  

• We know what month-end looks like in a busy finance department. It’s a madhouse. If that madhouse gets out of hand, invoices are processed slower and your suppliers aren’t paid on time.  
• When suppliers aren’t paid, they don’t supply and your project runs over. That’s affecting your bottom line, and your ability to get more projects into the calendar.  

Complicated compliance  

•   Another pitfall of manually processing invoices is that you’re opening yourself up to risk when it comes to audits. The number of invoices a construction firm processes magnifies this risk with lost or incorrectly filed paperwork. You don’t want these holes in your accounts when HMRC comes knocking.  

Zahara’s accounts payable solutions: the game changer 

• Zahara integrates with all major business software and plugs the gaps that those systems can’t handle for you. What are those gaps? Precisely the pitfalls that construction firms are exposed to in accounts payable. Here’s what Zahara can do for you and your bottom line.  

Real-time budget monitoring  

• With Zahara you won’t be looking back at your finances, you’ll be seeing it all in real time. If project costs are starting to snowball, you’ll know about it before it’s too late.  
• You will be able to see how every invoice is progressing step by step, from the raising of a purchase order to approval, delivery of supplies and payments – all in real time.  
• What’s more, you can set budgets by project and department to ensure that spending doesn’t get out of hand.      

Accessibility  

• Zahara is mobile compatible, meaning it can be accessed from anywhere – so long as you have an internet connection. Whether you’re in the middle of a construction site, back in the office, or who knows… riding an elephant on that much-needed Sri Lankan holiday, you can open your phone and see how things are looking finance-wise.  

Customisable approval workflows 

• In order to combat those unhelpful bottlenecks, we’ve added customisable approval workflows. This will allow you to control who has the ability to spend. You can assign project managers or department heads then, because the workflows are customisable, assign backup approvers in case your first choice is off sick or on holiday.  

Audit trails  

• Your invoices will now have records for every action taken from purchase order to payment. This visibility allows you to see into the history of every purchase.  
• Zahara will also archive your invoices in your business software so that you won’t have any discrepancies when your company is under audit.  

Digitalised invoice processing   

• This is the big one. From now on everything will be digital, no longer will your finance team be handling (or mishandling) paper invoices. The risk of lost paperwork is eliminated.  
• But the biggest benefit here is on time saved. Because Zahara is built to be simple, all you have to do is feed it digital invoices and the software will do the rest.  
• It reads and files invoices to your business software, using AI to three-way match (triple check) against purchase orders and goods received notes. That eliminates the threat of fraudsters sending you crooked invoices and protects you against double orders.  
• And while Zahara is doing this, your finance team can enjoy clocking off at regular hours and spending their work days focusing on more rewarding work than filing endless invoices – like finding ways to save the business money, or tuning up your profits.  

Real-world benefits for construction companies  

We’ve long said that our software is uniquely suited to construction companies. Because invoice processing is our game, we’re primely positioned to benefit companies that handle large numbers of invoices.  

Invoice processing no longer needs to be done manually. Advancements in technology have brought software to the point that it’s easy to deploy, inexpensive to run and far more efficient than processing invoices by hand.  

Not only will adopting automated accounts payable keep your bottom line low through protection from human error, fraud and duplicate orders, but it will add benefits too: the ability to track spending in real time, control your budgets and free up your finance teams.  

We’ve also heard back from a heap of construction companies that use our software about the money, the headaches and the time it has saved them. You can read about that here.  

If you’d like to speak to one of our experts about what Zahara can do for your construction firm, book yourself in for a demo or give us a call. We’d love to hear from you.