When Arecka Mather, APM, had to manage her team through a system conversion, she was particularly challenged. As a person who herself struggles with change, her leadership was essential to the success of the project, but she needed to overcome her own anxiety while getting everyone else on board as well.
In this podcast, Arecka talks about her experiences with IOFM Managing Editor Royce Grayson Morse, discussing the obstacles and day-to-day setbacks she and her team encountered during the process, and offering tips for others in similar situations. Maintaining her composure, being brave enough to ask lots of questions, working closely with her crew and being honest about her own challenges were key. Ultimately, teamwork and the ability to laugh throughout the journey brought her organization through a successful transition.
Listen to the podcast now to find out more about managing change when it’s not only tough for the team, but for you as well.
With a team as important and hard-working as Accounts Payable, it is easy for members to feel overworked, overwhelmed, and unmotivated to come to work. As leaders, it’s important to build our teams up, help them utilize unique communication strategies, and think outside the box in order to be efficient.
In this episode, we speak to Katie Noto, a Senior Manager of P2P at BDO USA, and delve into the intricacies of revitalizing team morale, optimizing efficiency without solely relying on automation, and appreciating the true value of your role in Accounts Payable.
Whether you’re a team leader seeking to transform your workplace culture, a professional eager to streamline operations through a more holistic approach to efficiency, or simply someone who believes in the power of recognizing each individual’s unique contributions, this episode is a must-listen.
Katie Noto is a Senior Manager of P2P at BDO USA and a busy working mom. Her passions are leadership, people, and numbers. She works daily to make P2P a profit center while inspiring her team to be the best versions of themselves.
IOFM receives a lot of questions about the process for correcting 1099 filings, and even whether a correction is necessary in the first place. In this podcast, we speak to Jason Dinesen about the circumstances under which it might be necessary to issue one. What if the recipient’s name was spelled wrong? What if the dollar amount or a TIN number was incorrect? What if a check was never cashed? And what should your approach be for correcting a 1099 if the recipient simply requests it?
Jason also explains the importance of filing a correction by the deadline, and the method by which it must be filed, whether electronically or in paper form. He adds that the consequences of failing to correct errors or for issuing too many incorrect 1099s in the first place can result in fines for each mistake, an amount which can become consequential for a large organization that produces a lot of these forms.
Listen now to discover must-know information about how to meet your filing obligations and avoid the financial impact and IRS scrutiny that comes from non-compliance.
It’s February, and romance is in the air! However, what you don’t want is for a scammer to woo you into doing something you shouldn’t. Unfortunately, fraudsters are always upping their game and developing new techniques to rip off unsuspecting AP professionals. Some of their latest gambits involve getting close to you on a personal level in order to get you to let your guard down.
In this fascinating podcast with Debra R. Richardson, vendor master file expert and certified fraud examiner, and Royce Grayson Morse, IOFM’s managing editor, we explore sneaky new ways those looking to steal from your company attempt to lure you in. One of those techniques involves a form of social engineering called malicious elicitation. Here, the scammer gets information from you in what appears to be a completely innocent manner — but is instead a well-crafted ploy to get you to reveal company information that should be kept confidential.
Listen to the podcast to find out how one major company almost fell victim — and learn how to spot these scams.
Find out more about the latest “romance” scams:
While the terms leadership and management are sometimes used interchangeably, there are important differences. IOFM recently spoke with Tracy Zurcher, District Manager at FedEx Ground, to get her thoughts on how to advance both within your organization.
She notes that while management tends to focus on process handling, leadership involves relationship building. Each practice requires different skills, but mastering both is the key to success. Focusing exclusively on management skills won’t inspire optimal results — staff members may lack engagement and their performance may suffer as a result. And because people are the heart of an organization, understanding their needs and working to help them improve will ultimately result in greater employee motivation — which will also impact process improvement.
Zurcher discusses useful tools and techniques she’s discovered during her years in management, offering a fun exercise to help others define their leadership styles. She also notes the useful philosophy put forth by the legendary Mr. Rogers and how that may be applied within the workplace.
Listen to this fascinating podcast to find out more.
When COVID hit, many Accounts Payable teams were unprepared, particularly if they relied on paper invoices and checks. Lynn Tate, APM, Accounts Payable & Expense Report Analyst for Urban Science Applications Inc., found herself in a situation that required a significant degree of creativity: In order to get her invoices approved and paid in a timely fashion, she needed to quickly find a way to manage them remotely.
What she settled on was a cloud-based file sharing service that enabled her to notify her teammates when there were invoices that needed review. She was able to alert them automatically, obtain the approvals and get the payments queued up for processing with minimal delay.
In this podcast, we’ll not only discuss how she made this decision and got things set up — we’ll explore the lessons she learned along the way and how the challenges of the pandemic actually ended up benefitting her process long-term.
“Upper management knows what you do … but they really don’t know what you do.” So says Patrick Kurtz, Client AP Manager for HomeRiver Group. He explains that although executives understand in principle what accounts payable involves, it’s likely that they don’t comprehend the day-to-day challenges of AP. While collecting metrics to present to the C-suite when making a case for automation is a helpful strategy, you must also be able to explain in concrete terms how that will play into process improvement.
Fear of change is also an important factor. Kurtz discusses how to analytically evaluate automation options to make sure you’re recommending the best solution for your situation. The AP team may also be leery, worried about how it will impact their jobs — or that they may even be unemployed after implementation.
Listen in on this fascinating discussion between Kurtz and Grace Closta, IOFM’s Content Manager, to discover how to approach automation in a way that makes sense for the organization while gaining buy-in from the key stakeholders, all the way up and down the chain.
Most organizations have non-U.S. vendors lurking in their vendor master files, but may not even realize it. Worse yet, some of those vendors may appear on the watchlists published by the U.S. government. Because doing business with these entities without proper due diligence regarding withholding — or even doing business with them at all — can result in steep fines and penalties, it’s important to identify those vendors in order to maintain compliance. But where to begin?
Vendor master file expert consultant Debra R. Richardson discusses this issue with IOFM’s Managing Editor Royce Grayson Morse, reviewing techniques that will help you identify foreign vendors you may not know you have. Once you find them, Richardson explains how to set them up properly and make sure you’re managing them correctly going forward. That includes collecting the right tax form and checking them against the government blocked and prohibited lists, plus recovering VAT and GST taxes if you paid them.
Listen in on the podcast “Identifying Foreign Vendors in Your VMF — and What to Do When You Find Them,” to discover best practices for managing these vendors in order to maintain compliance and avoid significant financial implications.
In his work as an educational consultant at Unimarket, Christopher Rust helps clients improve their P2P processes to realize cost savings while freeing up staff to make a greater contribution to the institution.
He recommends taking a thorough look at the impact of change management, both to the department and the institution overall. Moving contract management, procurement and AP into an electronic P2P environment relieves a lot of stress on the team and the typically heavy volume of transactions they must manage. The end goal is improved control of spend management, and for institutions that are research-based, improved compliance.
Rust provides suggestions about how to get started, including who to include on the project team and which functions to automate first, with the end goal being a free flowing, continuous improvement workflow in place of existing, disjointed manual processes. Tune in to this podcast to find out more about his strategy for tuning up P2P workflows.
Accounts payable professionals have all undoubtedly heard of artificial intelligence and how it’s likely to change the business landscape. But how is AI expected to impact AP’s functions?
In this podcast with David Glass, IOFM discusses the different types of what may be considered AI — from optical character recognition and robotic process automation, all the way to sophisticated machine learning capabilities. Glass discusses how these things differ, from simply reading in scanned fields on an invoice to having the technology interpret what it’s seeing, regardless of document layout; matching invoices to POs; and communicating with vendors. He explains how AI will ultimately simplify the entire end-to-end payment process.
Listen in to discover how Glass is already using AI, sometimes in unexpected ways, and how to get started on the AI journey, even without having the technology in place yet.
The IRS is making some significant changes to e-filing requirements. While it used to be that you could choose to file 1099s in paper form as long as you didn’t have more than 250 of any one type, that is no longer the case. In fact, the threshold for 2024 reporting of 2023 amounts has been reduced to an aggregated total of 10 forms of all types, and that includes more than just 1099s — it applies to W-2s and certain other forms as well.
In this podcast, IOFM Managing Editor Royce Grayson Morse talks with Jason Dinesen of Dinesen Tax about these new requirements. He discusses which forms are impacted and what to expect if you don’t comply. There’s good news, however: The IRS’ new electronic filing system, IRIS, should make it easier to file than the old FIRE system did.
Listen in to find out how these new changes will impact your organization and how to prepare for 2024 filing.
One thing that many AP professionals experience is finding themselves compartmentalized away from the organization as a whole. That’s due in part to the mistaken perception that accounts payable is a strictly clerical function. Yet the irony is that a major portion of the company’s cash moves through the hands of AP, a department that has inside knowledge about finance operations — and where both the inefficiencies and opportunities lie.
In this podcast, we speak to an experienced AP Director to explore strategies and techniques for leveraging this knowledge, with a goal of changing the organization’s thinking about the role of accounts payable and bringing their business intelligence to bear for positive change.
Tiffany Miller, APM, is Director of Accounts Payable for the Empire Portfolio Group in New York City. She is an active IOFM Advisory Panelist and has presented at workshops, webinars, podcasts and chapter meetings.
Good relationships in credit and collections make all the difference to a successful strategy. Both internal relationships with sales and management, and external relationships with customers are key to creating an environment of openness, collaboration — and ultimately, receivables success — yet it’s sometimes a delicate balance. Lisa stresses communicating early and often is important to making certain all the stakeholders are aware of a collections situation, to discovering why an invoice hasn’t been paid, and making sure the issues are resolved to ensure accurate and timely payments.
In this podcast, Defays discusses the problem of siloing in the O2C process and how that can impact the business’s bottom line. He also offers suggestions for improving O2C operations by using training resources, benchmarking and best practices as tools for broadening perspective and getting out of “we’ve always done it that way” mode.
Join us for a conversation between Debra Richardson and IOFM’s Executive Editor Jess Scheer as they discuss the vendor master file, fraud, compliance, keeping the VMF clean – and how desktop procedures are a big part of that effort.
Now more than ever, the world is in flux. It’s hard to keep up with this shifting landscape — not only because of the pandemic and the workplace changes it’s necessitated, but also due to staff attrition and increased automation. Staying current requires a willingness to seek out change through constant learning. Being open to new information and developing additional skills allows AP professionals to elevate work, build confidence and engage with the team in a positive way.
If you have a long list of professional achievements, yet you still doubt your own qualifications and worth sometimes, you may be a victim of “imposter syndrome.” According to Sherry Stroud, APM, this can prevent you from reaching your maximum potential. However, the good news is it can be overcome. In this podcast, Stroud explains what imposter syndrome is, how it works — and how to conquer it.
One problem with AP automation is that we tend to look no further than the implementation and the immediate issues it solves. But what comes after that?
In many cases, the assumption held by the top of the organization all the way on down is that automation will result in big staff reductions. However, in many cases, reallocating those human resources to more strategic, less clerical tasks can create a better outcome for the business.
Join Tiffany Miller as she discusses the hidden treasure within AP, what comes after automation, and how to educate upper management and the rest of the organization about the value-added tasks staff can take on when their clerical duties are minimized. The bottom line, she says, is treating team members with honesty and respect, no matter how their roles will change post-implementation.
Liberal arts graduate Michael Rochelle dreamed of working in accounts payable. Although he didn’t have any experience in the field, one day he took a chance and applied for an AP job. The hiring manager saw something in him and brought him onboard. Now, almost 20 years later, he has achieved his dream, bringing a fresh perspective to his role as Senior Manager. Join Michael as he offers an innovative, fun way of thinking about leadership in this entertaining podcast.
In this podcast, IOFM Advisory Panelist David Glass discusses virtual card programs and the benefits for both his organization and the vendors—faster payments for vendors, less time and money spent processing paper checks for his organization. Through the combined efforts of his team and his card provider, WVU Medicine continues to grow the program, making AP a profit center within just three years.
Accounts payable director Bethany Mezzadra offers insight into her techniques for developing a highly productive and engaged AP team. She candidly discusses her strategies for problem-solving and improvement during the pandemic, which coincided with a major system implementation earlier this year, and balancing performance with compassion during this difficult time.
Cameco Corporation’s AP/AR Manager Doreen Smuda offers her tips for leading a remote team. Her financial operations team began experimenting with working from home more than a year ago, giving her a head start in capturing lessons learned. Spoiler Alert: She thinks there may be some long-term good news for AP departments that come from these unparalleled times.
Friction is undermining the efforts of businesses to optimize their procure-to-pay cycle. Without addressing this friction, a business' procure-to-pay cycle will continue to be plagued by high costs, lots of errors, long cycle times, poor visibility, and supplier and stakeholder frustration. During this podcast, Sean Norton of Tungsten Network shares strategies for reducing or eliminating the five biggest contributors to friction in the procure-to-pay cycle.
Every business has friction in its P2P cycle. But businesses could never be sure of the impact of friction in their P2P cycle, until now. A new collaboration between IOFM and Tungsten Network is measuring P2P friction. During this episode, you will learn more about the initiative, hear early findings of the project, and get strategies for eliminating P2P friction.
Join IOFM’s Editor of Special Projects Mark Brousseau for a lively conversation with Stacey Chimenti, Canon USA’s Director of Financial Planning, about the reasons accounts payable processing is becoming more complex, and what accounts payable professionals can do about it.