Financials Having fun with Accounts Payable
| Having fun with Accounts Payable |
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| Written by Mario Herger |
| Friday, 11 November 2011 06:00 |
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Let's make them have some fun. That's what the winner of the SAP Gamification Cup a few months ago did by gamifying SAP's vendor invoice transaction. For each invoice and line item users and their teams can earn points, raise their status and participate in daily or monthly challenges for their team. The reward at the end of the month is a dollar amount, that can be donated to a charity. And the winning team is going to select the charity. While competition has it's attraction, the competition is more directed towards team from different offices, like the east versus the west coast AP team. But one important aspect in corporate environment is to collaborate. The variety of different invoice and vendor types can be overwhelming, and booking them correctly can be challenging. If you book them wrong, your expenses may not be reflected properly and your planning may be wrong. Or you may incur costs later in the year, when the tax season comes and your expenses are not booked in the right categories – and maybe bring you tax deductions. This is why the example also included a collaborative platform – in this case a pimped version of SAP Streamworks – where AP clerks collaborate, ask and answer questions related to their work and reward each other with karma points. This way collaboration and a path to mastery are encouraged and employees more engaged. Review costs are decreased and costly fines or corrections after audits minimized. A little addition to an otherwise tedious and boring task can be turn into a win-win-win situation for the organization, employees and charities.
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There certainly are not many employees, who like entering data after data after data. Vendor invoices are no exception. Accounts payable clerks have the additional challenge to enter the amounts and accounts properly, as you don't want to have the wrong amounts to the wrong vendors paid. While we can discuss lengthily, if this job shouldn't be automated anyways and vendor invoices be a task for system integrators, the reality is blunt: thousands of AP clerks enter invoices manually.
