Managing accounts payable across multiple entities sounds manageable. Until it isn’t.
One vendor wants CAD, another insists on EUR. One subsidiary pays weekly, the other still scans paper invoices. Pretty soon, your AP lead is stuck juggling time zones, tools, and tax jurisdictions instead of focusing on actual finance work.
Adding headcount might feel like the only fix, but most growing companies don’t need more people. They need a workflow that doesn’t break under pressure.
1. One approval path, not five inboxes
Letting each entity run its own AP process is a recipe for friction. Someone’s using email approvals. Another’s using Slack. And someone still wants to print a PDF and sign it. Approvals need to follow one master workflow. Not rigid, but unified. The goal is to keep things simple enough that your AP process scales without falling apart at invoice 101.
With the right platform, you can standardize approvals across the group while keeping local policies intact. That means every entity runs through the same flow, no matter what currency or country it's operating in.
If this sounds like exactly what your team’s been missing, take a minute and book a demo with Finofo. We’ll show you what a global-ready AP workflow actually looks like.
2. Batching approvals is not a “nice to have”
Most teams still review every invoice like it’s a one-off event. But when you’re managing dozens or hundreds per week, that time adds up fast.
Modern AP platforms batch by vendor, region, or payment cycle. You can approve in groups, apply shared logic, and cut time spent per invoice dramatically. And when everyone follows the same rules, you don’t just save time. You cut down on errors, escalations, and last-minute exceptions.
3. No more bank portal tab shuffling
Foreign exchange is where efficiency quietly dies. Between checking spot rates, converting currencies, and manually creating FX entries, your finance team is spending time on tasks that should be invisible.
A smarter approach: automate your FX workflows. With real-time rates built into your payment process, you can apply entity-specific FX policies and eliminate surprises. In 2023, Canadian SMBs alone lost over $800 million in hidden FX fees.
There’s no reason to keep contributing to that stat.
Global AP visibility is the real unlock
What matters isn’t just whether invoices are getting paid. It’s whether your team knows which are stuck, which are pending, and where the risks are.
If your current reporting requires switching tools or asking someone to pull a weekly update, you’re already behind. A consolidated dashboard across entities is no longer a luxury. It’s survival.
We’ve seen finance teams slash reporting time by over 60% just by replacing siloed systems with a single source of truth. Want to see how that looks in practice? Book a demo and we’ll walk you through it.
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