6 Ways Finance and AP Can Build Resilience in Economic Uncertainty

In a recent webinar, we asked Rob Israch, President at Tipalti, to take his crystal ball out and show us what the future of finance looks like, particularly for AP teams. What does finance need to work on in 2023 and beyond to ensure resilience?

Watch the full webinar here, or the 5-minute clip below for his response.

The key areas where finance can help build resilience are:

1 - Finance and capital structure. Finance teams play an important role helping the business understand the actions required for the next financial round or the next investment round.

• If it happens to be sooner rather than later, what are your options between debt and other forms of capital?
• What are the metrics and the performance measurement that need to be exposed in order to get that investment at the right level?

2 - Giving early visibility of top-line performance, and working through models for:

• What happens if inflation goes up or down?
• What happens if interest rates change?

How well are you prepared to weather those different storms?

3 - Flexibility and nimbleness — making sure that both the business and the budget planning have sensitivities built in. If your forecasts don’t go exactly to plan, how can you make adjustments to meet your targets?

4 - Automation to identify inefficiencies in the finance operation of the business, and making sure that the business has moved forward fairly aggressively on that front.

5 - Instituting cost controls across the wider business to help control costs which will in turn help improve general spend visibility.

6 - Automating in a more holistic way. Many companies moved to automate and fix problems reactively to solve problems and inefficiencies. However, automating invoice processing without supplier management will lead to continued problems, particularly with payments in a high-volume, cross-border environment. It’s essential to look at the end-to-end aspect of AP to address it, and not just for the short-term.

Hear more tips in the short clip below or the full webinar here.