Posts Tagged ‘Accounts Payable Software’
Tuesday, March 19th, 2013
Large Data systems these days depend on the quality of data we feed them. Optimizing supplier relationships and ERP system effectiveness ultimately rely heavily upon our ability to collect timely accurate information. Too many times across our businesses the data that has been received from suppliers decays and leaves us with useless information for us to look at when we are trying to make decisions.
Accurate supplier data drives system effectiveness and saves time, resource, and dollars. Large volumes of data across multiple systems and departments, along with data decay are challenges to maintaining quality supplier data. Up-to-date supplier information is critical for compliance with regulations and controls, such as OFAC screening, diversity tracking, and new tax legislation.
Lavante SIM: On-Demand Supplier Information Management as a Strategy.
Lavante SIM enables companies to proactively communicate with suppliers and gain real-time visibility into suppliers and relationships. Lavante SIM drives compliance across the supplier lifecycle–from initial vendor master file cleansing, to on-boarding, to ongoing maintenance. Set important Vendor Master Controls and let the Lavante software manage your communications.
- Lavante On-Demand Supplier Master Data Management
Drive master data compliance & insight across the supplier life cycle:
- Core Supplier Data
- Tax Information
- Ownership & Diversity
- Supplier Classification
|
- Insurance & Risk
- Financial Information
- Contract Information
|
Create an enterprise-wide single source of truth for supplier master data:
- Ensure quality of supplier data
- Gain insight into your suppliers and relationships
- Drive compliance with regulations and internal controls
- Drive corporate compliance with new 1099 Tax Legislation
- Reduce supplier risk
- Reduce cost of managing supplier information
Why Lavante Supplier Information Management?
- Quick Time to Value: On-demand, “out-of-the-box” with immediate results
- The Highest Supplier Compliance: 8X results of alternative solutions
- Ongoing Communication: Drives supplier participation and data quality
- Funded by Recovery: Works seamlessly with Lavante Recovery
Benefits of Supplier Master Data Management | MDM Systems | MDM Strategy
Tags: 1099, Accounts Payable Software, AP Automation, SIM, Supplier Information Management, TIN Management, vendor file cleansing, Vendor Master File Management
Posted in AP Industry, AP Technology Innovation, Supplier Information Management, Technology, Vendor File Cleansing, Vendor File Management, W9 | No Comments »
Thursday, March 7th, 2013
The topic of Automation of Vendor File Management is back in the spotlight in the Lavante Webinar Series.
The next webinar event is scheduled for Tuesday, March 12th.
We will be presenting the curriculum twice to accommodate busy schedules.
If you would like to attend there is still space available
8am PT https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/579562550
11am PT https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/746389958
The webinar will be a conversation between Lavante CEO, Joe Flynn and AP Now & Tomorrow’s CEO, Mary Schaeffer.
Mary Schaeffer is a recognized thought leader in AP. She is the creator of IFO’s Innovation Certificate Program, a member of the IFO’s Education Committee and gives several sessions every year at the IFO annual Fusion trade show.
Mary publishes a weekly Ezine that we recommend to all of our readers. For more information you can sign up HERE
Here is an exerpt from Mary’s bio located on her site HERE
Mary S. Schaeffer
Editorial Director & Publisher
CRYSTALLUS, Inc. publisher of several accounts payable periodicals
- Nationally recognized accounts payable expert and consultant
- Frequent speaker at seminars, conferences and online events
- Editor-at-Large CFO Publishing’s Learning Pro: AP Edition
- Regular contributor to the AICPA’s Corporate Finance Insider
- Publisher and editorial director of the Accounts Payable Now & Tomorrow monthly newsletter
- Creator of Institute of Financial Operations Accounts Payable Innovation Certificate program
- Writes a free weekly e-zine, e-AP News
- Author more than 15 business books including the Controller & CFO’s Guide to Accounts Payable and Fraud in Accounts Payable: How to Prevent It (See full list below)
- M.B.A. Finance, NYU; B.S. Math, York College
Books by Mary S. Schaeffer
- Do-It-Yourself Accounts Payable Consultant Handbook first, second and third editions (CRYSTALLUS, Inc. 2011, 2012, 2013)
- Fraud in Accounts Payable: How to Prevent It (John Wiley & Sons September 2008)
- New Payment World: A Manager’s Guide to Creating an Efficient Payment Process (John Wiley & Sons 2007)
- Travel and Entertainment Best Practices (John Wiley & Sons 2007)
- Controller and CFO’s Guide to Accounts Payable (John Wiley & Sons 2006)
- Accounts Payable and Sarbanes-Oxley: Strengthening Your Internal Controls (John Wiley & Sons 2006)
- The Future of Accounts Payable (CRYSTALLUS, Inc. 2006)
- Accounts Payable: A Guide to Running an Efficient Department First edition, Second edition and Supplements (John Wiley & Sons, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2002 , 2003, 2004)
- Accounts Payable Best Practices (John Wiley & Sons 2004)
- Essentials of Accounts Payable (John Wiley & Sons 2002)
- Essentials of Credit, Collections and Accounts Receivable (John Wiley & Sons 2003)
- International Credit and Collections (John Wiley & Sons 1999)
- Understanding Interest Rate Swaps (McGraw Hill 1994)
- Your Dream Vacation Home (McGraw Hill 1992)
- Triumph Over Tragedy (with John Duffy, John Wiley & Sons 2002)
Mary Schaeffer has the inimitable ability to find accounts-payable-related solutions that really work—without making a major dent in the bottom line. Armed with a degree in math and a graduate degree in finance, she takes a “roll up your sleeves and dig into the details” approach to finding solutions to those problems that cause migraines for CFOs, controllers, and managers.
Fifteen years spent researching and writing about payment issues gives Mary Schaeffer a unique vantage point. Combine that with an almost equal amount of time spent in the corporate trenches of several large finance and treasury departments and you’ll see why she’s become known as America’s leading accounts payable expert.
A wide variety of institutions have taken advantage of her unique expertise: John Wiley & Sons has published over a dozen of her books; CRYSTALLUS, Inc. (www.ap-now.com) relies on her know-how to direct its professional publication, training, and consulting business; and the AICPA features her articles in its Corporate Finance Insider. Let’s not overlook the long list of organizations that have turned to her for best practice guidance of their accounts payable function and training of their accounts payable staff.
Ms. Schaeffer has a BS in Mathematics from York College (CUNY) and a MBA in Finance from New York University. She can be reached at marys@ap-now.com
Tags: 1099 Reporting, Accounts Payable Software, AP Automation, AP Industry, AP Technology, Lavante, Lavante webinar, Supplier Information Management, Vendor File Mgmt, Vendor Master File Management
Posted in AP Industry, IFO, Industry Associations, Lavante, Shared Services, Supplier Information Management, Tax ID Numbers, Vendor File Cleansing, Vendor File Management, Webinar | No Comments »
Monday, December 13th, 2010
Today is an exciting day at Lavante as we announce the close of our Series C funding for $8M led by SAP Ventures. This is celebratory news for Lavante and our customers, as it is a strong validation of our vision of how on-demand technology solutions can advance the recovery auditing and supplier information management markets. According to our new board member Andreas Weiskam, Partner at SAP Ventures:
“Lavante is the leader in technology for recovery auditing. Its unique recovery solution automates the traditionally manual process of vendor statement audits, delivering multiple times the results of traditional approaches to customers in near immediate timeframes.”
Andreas also states, “Lavante’s supplier information management solution, combined with its recovery auditing solution, is the killer application to drive rapid adoption of the Lavante Supplier Network. SAP Ventures sees a massive market opportunity for Lavante.”
This is great validation of our strategy!
The strategic investment will help Lavante continue our market momentum and customer acquisition, as well as accelerate investments into product development. We will continue to grow our ground-breaking on-demand supplier management solutions – including recovery auditing, supplier information management and TIN management and to drive adoption of the Lavante Supplier Network™.
We are excited by the confidence SAP Ventures demonstrates in Lavante’s ability to deliver meaningful technology advancements for the supplier information management and recovery markets.
I welcome your thoughts about this announcement and your ideas about how you feel technology can be applied to the recovery and supplier information management markets. Please send me your ideas, thoughts, questions and comments!
To read the full Lavante press release about this funding announcement, please visit: http://www.lavante.com/news/lavante-series-c-funding
Tags: Accounts Payable Softare, Accounts Payable Software, funding, On-Demand recovery audit solutions, Profit Recovery, recovery auditing
Posted in AP Industry, Lavante, Recovery Audit, Shared Services, Supplier Information Management | 1 Comment »
Monday, September 20th, 2010
AP Matters Magazine highlighted Lavante in a recent article in their September/October edition.
The Article features conversations with executives from Lavante and Ariba discussing how their firms are creating new cash flow metrics that are helping financial executive watch there bottom line a little more closely.
Joe Flynn, CEO of Lavante discussed how Lavante’s DCO metric (which measure the weighted average of days that a credit is outstanding until it is collected by an enterprise) has become an important tool for companies to maximize the cash flow associated with recovery auditing. The article includes the following quote from Flynn, “Everyone’s saying, ‘Wow, I didn’t know you could actually track that. There’s a whole host of line items of credits you’re not aware of out in your supplier population. It’s like your working capital trapped in your supply chain.”
The article also highlights a conversation with Peter Lugli, senior director of working capital management and business development with Ariba. Lugli discusses the “cash conversion cycle” in depth and adds, “There’s this renewed emphasis on the cash conversion cycle. The CFO and controller are looking at their operations through the lens of cash flow more than they did before.”
READ MORE HERE
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Tags: Accounts Payable Software, AP Industry, ariba, benchmarking, cash conversion cycle, CFO, Controller, Lavante, Profit Recovery, recovery auditing, Shared Services, Technology
Posted in AP Industry, Lavante, Recovery Audit, Shared Services | No Comments »
Thursday, August 26th, 2010
In part one of this blog we discussed how the traditional approach to vendor statement auditing recovers only up to $100,000 per every $1B audited annual whereas a proper statement audit should recover 5-10X that amount. In this blog I would like to discuss how and why Lavante is able to hit those much higher numbers.
Lavante Recovery is the industry’s premier statement audit product. The Lavante Recovery application and services are built on the industry’s most powerful platform for communicating with suppliers, collecting AR data, discovering credits and delivering recoveries to clients. Lavante Recovery targets the entire addressable supplier population without bias and commonly achieves compliance rates above 90%. It is systematically impossible for any other competitive statement audit process to out-recover Lavante’s process.
Lavante’s outreach includes initial and ongoing requests for AR data as well as follow up requests for non-compliant suppliers. Follow-up requests alternate by email, fax, mail and phone to maximize exposure and response rates. Lavante electronically archives all incoming documentation and data per supplier per client for retrieval at any time. Dedicated auditors review all documents for potential credits and communicate directly with the supplier to secure written verification of all claims. Recoveries are delivered to clients via an on-demand application in weekly batches accompanied by supporting documents and communication detail.
Based on ten years of benchmarking, Lavante has determined that 61% of credit-generating suppliers are distributed throughout the lower 80% of a company’s addressable vendor master file. Through their expansive review, Lavante delivers clients between $600,000 and $900,000 per every $1 Billion audited. In addition, Lavante delivers a complete suite of supplier reports and best practice recommendations for vendor file management.
Tags: Accounts Payable Software, AP Industry, Profit Recovery, recovery auditing, Shared Services, Vendor File Mgmt
Posted in Recovery Audit, Supplier Information Management, Vendor Statement Audit | No Comments »
Thursday, August 19th, 2010
Since the beginning of the recovery audit industry, traditional firms have focused their attention on client AP data to perform recovery reviews. Statement auditing (the practice of collecting and reviewing supplier AR records) required a different process than a client-side review. Due to manual labor and outreach requirements, traditional firms review only a small subset (the top 5-20%) of the addressable supplier population. As a result, traditional firms report that statement audit claims comprise only 5-10% of their total recovery effort. These firms also report overall recoveries of approximately $1 Million in annual recoveries per every $1 Billion audited, which means that traditional firms are recovering only up to $100,000 in statement audit claims per every $1 Billion audited. This total is a very small percentage of the true opportunity of a properly executed statement audit.
A statement audit, done correctly, should include a review of all addressable suppliers and will uncover 10–20 times the statement audit claims of a traditional recovery audit. A specialized statement audit firm focuses their attention on nuances of the vendor master file as well as the AR records of the individual supplier. A proper statement audit includes a thorough review of supplier relationships and should also provide some mechanism for patching the missing and/or inaccurate data that commonly plagues a company’s supplier records.
Specialized statement audit firms must perform two-way communications with a massive volume of companies and should demonstrate an automated method for soliciting, tracking, re-soliciting (if necessary), collecting, archiving, retrieving, and performing workflow for supplier AR records. An ideal system will also include consideration for leveraging many different forms of outreach (email, phone, fax & mail) to maximize compliance.
Considering the communication and work flow demands of a proper statement audit, it is understandable why traditional firms cannot perform the large scale review. Traditional methods for reviewing client-side data simply do not translate into a successful statement audit. Only a firm specializing in statement auditing should perform the review.
Tags: Accounts Payable Software, AP Industry, benchmarking, Profit Recovery, recovery auditing, Technology
Posted in AP Industry, Recovery Audit, Vendor Statement Audit | No Comments »
Wednesday, August 11th, 2010
Hello All,
I am very proud to announce that Lavante SIM was released for general availability on August 9th. This launch marks the expansion of our vendor file management services into a larger suite of supplier information management products and services.
Lavante SIM has been created specifically to address the feedback that we have received from the market over the years about the challenges that all of you face. Lavante has learned that supplier information is integral to optimizing relationships with suppliers and for maximizing the value from your ERP system and other automated solutions. Used correctly, a well-kept supplier master data file is a strategic asset that you can leverage into time savings, resource savings and dollars to your bottom line.
The collection and management of supplier data is more important now than ever based on the growing number of regulations and controls that your departments are faced with. In that last years alone stricter penalties and controls have accompanied new OFAC screening laws, Sarbanes Oxley and diversity mandates (to name a few). In just the last few months, 1099 tax legislation was included in the new health care bill which will require you to collect TINs, W-9s and W-8s and to perform 1099 reporting on a larger scale than ever before. Your companies will likely need to implement new policies and new systems to manage supplier information and stay in compliance.
Lavante SIM has been built as a direct solution to the challenges that you and your departments face. The on-demand application is the industry’s most advanced solution and enables companies to proactively engage with suppliers on an ongoing basis. The product drives 8 times the compliance of any other competitive solution and manages communication across the entire supplier lifecycle, from on-boarding, to data capture and validation, to automated maintenance. Lavante SIM can help you with vendor master file cleansing as well as TIN collection and validation against the IRS website. The product will even help to reduce costs and labor of ERP installs and upgrades.
We are proud to announce the delivery of this revolutionary product and we are proud to work so closely with our clients to create real solutions to major industry problems. I encourage you to reach to your Lavante contact person or to visit the Lavante website at www.lavante.com to learn more.
Thanks for taking the time to read this,
Joe Flynn, Founder and CEO, Lavante Inc.
Lavante Supplier Information Support:
408-754-0491
888-610-0757
Tags: Accounts Payable Software, Lavante, Supplier Information Management, Technology
Posted in 1099 Reporting, AP Industry, Lavante, Supplier Information Management, Tax ID Numbers, Technology | No Comments »
Monday, July 12th, 2010
Supplier information is integral to optimizing your relationships with your suppliers and for maximizing the value from your ERP system and other automated solutions. Used correctly, a well kept supplier master data file is a strategic asset that can be leveraged into time savings, resource savings and dollars to your company’s bottom line.
The biggest challenge to maintaining the quality of your supplier data is its near immediate decay after being recorded. Suppliers constantly undergo mergers, purges, acquisitions and employee churn that challenge the integrity of their data. Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) reports its database of businesses experiences annual changes of 20% for addresses, 17% for business names, and 18% for phone numbers underscoring how quickly and frequently supplier data decays. ERP systems perform some data quality measures at the time a supplier is set up, but they do little to preserve the integrity of the data over time. ERP systems are reliant on quality data, but they do not ensure it.
Allowing your supplier data to decay over time is very costly to your enterprise. Inaccurate data delays implementation of ERP systems and other automated solutions and can prevent those solutions from achieving their optimal ROI, effectiveness or their value over time. Failure to identify overlaps or relationships within your supplier population can lead to missed volume discounts or rebates as well as an increase of duplicate payments by up to 300%. Poor supplier data quality is also very costly in terms of lost efficiency and time. Bad addresses alone can lead to miss-sent shipments and checks. Quality supplier data is also vital to stay in compliance with various external regulations and internal controls. Failure to achieve this compliance can be both disruptive and very costly while causing great exposure and risk.
Collection and management of supplier data is more important now than ever. New 1099 tax legislation included in the funding provisions of the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act (March 2010) requires companies to collect valid Tax Identification Numbers (TINs) on a much larger scale than pre-legislation levels. Today most companies are expected to perform 1099 reporting for less than 10% of their supplier population. When the new law takes effect, companies can expect reporting levels to rise above 90%. Companies will need to implement new policies and potentially even new systems to manage supplier information more accurately in pursuit of staying in compliance.
The question arises: How are you going to ensure the ongoing quality of supplier information to achieve optimal project ROI and on-going efficiency while maintaining compliance with controls and regulations?
Check back for part two.
Tags: 1099, Accounts Payable Software, AP Industry, benchmarking, Lavante, Shared Services, Tax ID Numbers, Tax Legislation, TIN Management, TIN's, Vendor File Mgmt
Posted in 1099 Reporting, Supplier Information Management, Tax ID Numbers, Technology | No Comments »
Wednesday, June 16th, 2010
Download the “New 1099 Tax Laws” Webinar for free!
We are still celebrating a huge success surrounding last Friday’s webinar. With very limited outreach efforts, we overbooked the capacity of our web cast provider and we retained all attendees for the entire event. Anyone well rehearsed in presenting webinars will acknowledge bth of these data points as huge feats!
Sherry DePew conducted and expert walk-thru of the new 1o99 laws which will dictate the future of 1099 reporting for companies (of all sizes) for the next several years. The new laws will increase workloads, staffing requirements and exposure to significant non-compliance fines. Sherry outlined a very realistic plan for getting all the facts and for getting prepared.
We are scheduling many more webinar events about similar and related topics soon. Please notify us at info@lavante.com to get on our distribution list.
We would love to hear any comments or questions whether you were able to attend of not and we are offering a free video replay of the webinar by clicking on the tile below.
Tags: 1099, 1099 Reporting, Accounts Payable Software, AP Industry, Lavante, Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010
Posted in 1099 Reporting, AP Industry, Shared Services | No Comments »
