Investment bank intern dies after pulling three all nighters in a row

[alfred russel]

My accounts payable dept forgets to pay accounts.

I love your AP department. 

We have the opposite problem with ours. If you don't pay bills, cash flows look better. 

[CountDeMoney]

Fucking AP. The longer they take to pay, the more vendors call me looking for their money.  Fuck those monkeys.

[alfred russel]

AP people aren't accountants.  A monkey could work in AP.

It depends...I've seen this new software that scans invoices from any vendor and that will by some mechanism (it was explained to me once, and I just registered it as "magic") enters all the details into the ERP, including the journal entry, and matches the invoice with a PO. There are humans that do nothing all day other than compare what was scanned to what was entered into the system (to make sure the "magic" worked). That is a horrible job, and involves 0 thinking.

On the other hand, probably most accounting entries and many key accruals go through AP. It also is a key part of managing cash flows and can run your organization into big problems if not done right (unclaimed property audits for example). It depends what you are doing in AP.

[Sheilbh]

How on earth was an intern getting paid so much? They usually get nothing.

Firms that are really looking for talent pay their interns and pay them well because they know the alternative is to limit their pool of potential recruits to the wealthy or those who live in London already.

Firms that are basically nepotistic, or just looking for cheap labour don't care.

[MadImmortalMan]

AP people aren't accountants.  A monkey could work in AP.

It depends...I've seen this new software that scans invoices from any vendor and that will by some mechanism (it was explained to me once, and I just registered it as "magic") enters all the details into the ERP, including the journal entry, and matches the invoice with a PO. There are humans that do nothing all day other than compare what was scanned to what was entered into the system (to make sure the "magic" worked). That is a horrible job, and involves 0 thinking.

On the other hand, probably most accounting entries and many key accruals go through AP. It also is a key part of managing cash flows and can run your organization into big problems if not done right (unclaimed property audits for example). It depends what you are doing in AP.

OCR is great if the invoices come in a standard format with the information always on the same part of the page. But if you're paying a thousand different companies all with different invoice formats, then it might take more time to program the document recognition than to just manually input. It's one of those things that's really useful in certain situations but cannot be applied more broadly.

[Maximus]

OCR is great if the invoices come in a standard format with the information always on the same part of the page. But if you're paying a thousand different companies all with different invoice formats, then it might take more time to program the document recognition than to just manually input. It's one of those things that's really useful in certain situations but cannot be applied more broadly.

I think the state of that technology is rapidly changing. Even if what you say is true now I would not bet on it within a few years.

[Caliga]

It depends...I've seen this new software that scans invoices from any vendor and that will by some mechanism (it was explained to me once, and I just registered it as "magic") enters all the details into the ERP, including the journal entry, and matches the invoice with a PO. There are humans that do nothing all day other than compare what was scanned to what was entered into the system (to make sure the "magic" worked). That is a horrible job, and involves 0 thinking.

Yeah, we're looking at implementing that.

[Caliga]

AP people aren't accountants.  A monkey could work in AP.

I worked in AP for five years and agree.

I'm not saying everyone that works in AP is dumb, but I am saying it's not akin to being an actual accountant... not even close.  In our AP department there's at least one clerk who is very bright.  The others... ehhh, no comment.

[Caliga]

The other amusing thing with AP... I'm finishing up a project wherein we are now outsourcing all of our check cutting and are making an effort to pay most of our vendors via EFT.  The AP people LOVE the changes.... I guess because they aren't able to think logically about the long-term effects of me having implemented that.

[Zanza]

It depends...I've seen this new software that scans invoices from any vendor and that will by some mechanism (it was explained to me once, and I just registered it as "magic") enters all the details into the ERP, including the journal entry, and matches the invoice with a PO. There are humans that do nothing all day other than compare what was scanned to what was entered into the system (to make sure the "magic" worked). That is a horrible job, and involves 0 thinking.

In our SAP systems we have started to use a feature called Evaluated Receipt Settlement that will create the invoice based on goods receipts or service entry sheets and the supplier will basically just get the money and a kind of invoice from us so there is no more invoice document from the supplier that we would have to scan.

[alfred russel]

OCR is great if the invoices come in a standard format with the information always on the same part of the page. But if you're paying a thousand different companies all with different invoice formats, then it might take more time to program the document recognition than to just manually input. It's one of those things that's really useful in certain situations but cannot be applied more broadly.

(CdM--don't read below for your own good)

A benefit is that you can have the invoices sent to a center where they are just scanned in. At that point the OCR software may be not be fully effective, but where the fixing task is done is no longer relevant (because you now have a scanned of the invoice in the system). You can take an AP department in the US or Europe, get rid of it, just get a service to scan in invoices, and then do the fixing of OCR errors in India. You may not save many hours, but you may still save money.

[alfred russel]

In our SAP systems we have started to use a feature called Evaluated Receipt Settlement that will create the invoice based on goods receipts or service entry sheets and the supplier will basically just get the money and a kind of invoice from us so there is no more invoice document from the supplier that we would have to scan.

We use that some...I don't like it...what if the data entry for the price per unit is wrong? Or the goods receipt is messed up? You are eliminating a part of the 3 way match.

[Zanza]

The unit price is only entered into the system once when it is negotiated. All release orders against the blanket order just pull the price from there. So you just need to be careful when entering the price once. The goods receipt being messed up is of course a possible weakness, but especially if you actually buy goods that go to a warehouse, the goods receipt process can be automated with RFID or scans too, so there is very little room for error. If it is goods or services that are delivered to an office or so without a warehousing process, there is obviously more room for error.

[Berkut]

The other amusing thing with AP... I'm finishing up a project wherein we are now outsourcing all of our check cutting and are making an effort to pay most of our vendors via EFT.  The AP people LOVE the changes.... I guess because they aren't able to think logically about the long-term effects of me having implemented that.

Hehe, my company provides end to end loan decisioning software for medium and large banks (hell, even some smaller banks now, I am part of the effort in fact to streamline our offering to down market it).

Our stuff does everything from track the customer, to format the deal, to run credit checks and risk analysis to generating the legal documents to provisioning the loan itself and will even integrate with the loan servicing system to send the loan off to servicing once it is made.

Obviously, there is a huge amount of customization and configuration work involved in this.

And who is who we have to work with to understand the existing process at a given client?

Well, the portions of the loan department who will be VERY streamlined once we get this all in place, of course...

[Zanza]

Well, the portions of the loan department who will be VERY streamlined once we get this all in place, of course...

I had to fill out a questionnaire recently whether my job can be moved to India. I came to the conclusion that it can't be moved there.