Workflow Guide: Accounts Payable (AP) Automation

This is RootFi's Accounts Payable Workflow Guide, which helps Accounts Payable companies automate the collection and reconciliation of bills, bill payments, credit notes, and purchase orders with their customers’ respective accounting systems.

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Automation transforms accounts payable (AP) products, streamlining time-consuming manual tasks like invoice collection, processing, approval and payment for your business customers. However, the challenge of reconciling AP workflows into your customers’ accounting platforms remains unsolved.

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Accounting integrations are crucial for closing the gap between your AP automation solution and your customers’ accounting systems. This guide outlines how to leverage accounting integrations through RootFi's Unified Accounting API, facilitating the development of an end-to-end automated AP product.

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What is the Accounts Payable (AP) Workflow?

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The AP workflow involves critical steps that greatly benefit from automation:

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1. Bill Collection: Capture and log bills received from suppliers.
2. Bill Verification: Validate bill details against purchase orders and receipts.
3. Execute Approval: Route bills for approval based on predefined workflows.
4. Payment Processing: Execute payment to suppliers upon approval.
5. Reconciliation: Match bills, bill payments with transactions in accounting systems.

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Integration with accounting systems is essential to automate these steps, particularly for reconciliation, ensuring transactions are accurately recorded and efficiently managed.

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The Role of Accounting Integrations and RootFi's Unified Accounting API

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While essential, developing and maintaining multiple accounting integrations in-house is resource-intensive. RootFi's Unified API simplifies this process by providing a single API to connect with over 20 accounting platforms.

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Related: Use our API cost calculator to estimate the cost of building integrations in-house.

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The benefits of a Unified API include:

• Global Connectivity: Simplifies integration with multiple accounting platforms, ensuring maximum coverage for current and future customers.
• Accelerated Go-to-Market: Integrating with one Unified API significantly cuts down the time required to build, test and launch an integrated product.
• Cost Savings: Lowers the overall cost of developing and maintaining integrations, allowing resources to focus on core product development.
• Maintenance Ease: Offloads integration maintenance responsibilities, allowing your team to focus on core product enhancement.

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Adopting RootFi's Unified API speeds up the development process and adds significant value to your Accounts Payable (AP) solution, making it more reliable and easier to integrate with customers' preferred accounting systems.

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How to Build an Automated Accounts Payable (AP) product with a Unified Accounting API

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You can handle all of the common workflows required to offer your customers an Accounts Payable (AP)/ Bill Payment product. Here is a quick summary of all the steps involved:

1. (One Time Activity) Connect a customer's accounting systems with RootFi’s Authentican Flow.
2. Use the Bills API to create a Bill and link Contacts, Purchase Orders, Items, and Accounts to the respective Bill.
3. Upload Documents to their respective Expense/Invoice/Bill
4. Create and Link Bill Payments and Bill Credit Notes to Contacts and Open Bills.

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Set Up an Automated Accounts Payable (AP) Workflow with Accounting Integrations (Step-by-step Guide)

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Step 1 (One-Time Activity): Connect with your customers’ accounting platform

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RootFi provides two convenient options to connect with your customers’s accounting platform:

1. Use RootFi’s Invite Link, a convenient and secure URL, or
2. Embed RootFi’s Connect SDK into your application

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The Invite Link requires no code to use, making it suitable to get started without a developer. You can customize and white-label this onboarding process with RootFi’s Connect SDK, allowing authentication to occur natively in your product. Either way, your customers will be guided through a simple authorization flow to connect their respective accounting platforms to your product.

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1. Use our Dashboard or APIs to connect a customer’s accounting platform
2. Use the POST/Invite-Link API.
3. Name your customers’ company.
4. A unique company_id will be generated once your customer completes the authentication flow. This company_id will be used to read and write data to their accounting platform.

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Step 2: Create a Bill

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Use the POST/bills API to create bills.

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Here are some important points to note.

1. Vendor - This is the vendor linked to the Bill. Use the GET/contacts and POST/contacts APIs. Please note a Contact ID is required to post a Bill, so if the contact in question does not already exist on the accounting platform, then you will first have to create a new vendor using the POST/contacts API.
2. Expense Account or Debited Account- You can push multiple line items (Usually just 1) when pushing an expense. Each line item will have an expense account associated (category = ‘Expense’). The GET/accounts API lets you fetch all accounts, and you can filter the account type by category: expense through Postman or GraphQL.
3. Purchase Order: Most companies usually issue Purchase Orders before a bill is generated. The purchase order ID can be passed in the POST/bill API to link the purchase order and bill.
4. Credit Account (Not Required) - When you use the POST/bills API, bills are automatically placed under the Account - Category= ‘liability’ and account_type= ‘accounts_payable’

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Step 3: Upload Documents

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The POST/ documents API lets you upload a file to an expense, invoice, bills.

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Step 4: Link Bill Payment and Credit Notes

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A Bill Payment credits an account that serves as the source of funds for the payment ( Credit card or Bank).

1. Use the Post/bill_payments API to create and link bill payments.

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The bill credit note can be created and immediately applied to a bill, or it can be created and left unapplied.

1. use the POST/Bill_credit note API to create a Bill Credit note, which can be linked to a Vendor.

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Learn how to build an Automated Accounts Payable (AP) product

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The steps above explain how to manage the most common actions of an automated Accounts Payable (AP) product with RootFi’s accounting integrations. If you have more questions or would like to build an automated Accounts Payable (AP) product with RootFi’s Unified APIs, we’d love to help you get started. Speak to our integration experts today!

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