SPEND MONEY
A Professional Accounts Payable Process

At this stage, managing bills yourself isn’t sustainable — even if you think you like keeping an eye on things. The volume is too high, and the risk of errors or missed payments is too great.

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Here’s what a professional Accounts Payable process looks like:

 

Centralised inbox. All supplier invoices go to a dedicated email address (e.g. accounts@yourbusiness.co.nz). They don’t go to the business owner, and they don’t get lost in someone’s personal inbox.

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Accurate coding. A bookkeeper enters each bill and codes it against the correct budget line. This step is critical — if it’s done poorly, your reports are unreliable.

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Approval workflow. Bills are sent for approval before payment. This can be done through an app (which costs a small amount but saves significant time) or manually (which costs more in staff time). I recommend the app.

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Payment batch. Once a week, your bookkeeper prepares a payment batch, uploads it to the bank, and sends it to two authorisers for sign-off. The file includes a record of all invoices so authorisers can review anything they want to.

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This is a clean, stress-free process when it’s run by the right people. We run this for a number of existing clients and can either take it on for you or help you build the capability in-house.