What Is AP Wellness (and Why Do We Focus on It)?
Accounts Payable (AP) can sometimes feel like the forgotten corner of the working world, and yet the work that happens in AP is vital to every other area of business. AP professionals often experience immense stress, pressure, and fatigue, resulting in high levels of burnout.
According to a 2023 study by PYMNTS in collaboration with Billtrust, “More than 75% of AP teams reported processing more invoices” and working longer hours to handle the workload. “Roughly half of respondents said this burden is leading to rapid burnout...As a result, nearly one in four AP professionals are considering resignation.” Clearly, there is something awry.
At Mekorma, our goal is to make the lives of AP professionals as easy as possible. We believe AP wellness is not only achievable but also incredibly important for the long-term well-being of organizations and individuals. We are committed to helping reduce the level of burnout among AP professionals by creating tools and systems that support long-term wellness.
What is AP Wellness?
The Global Wellness Institute defines wellness as “the active pursuit of activities, choices and lifestyles that lead to a state of holistic health.”
For Accounts Payable, we break down the key components of wellness to ease, control, and care.
As human beings, our level of wellness is often directly connected to how much we experience: ease or flow, control over our circumstances (or work), and kindness or compassion from fellow human beings.
In the world of work (and AP specifically) finding ease, control, and care comes down to implementing tools and automations that improve efficiency, enhance control, and reduce tedious or repetitive tasks. It’s also incredibly important for AP teams to experience opportunities to feel supported, heard, and connected.
Let’s dig deeper.
Ease: Life is hard enough - your AP shouldn’t be.
The Dalai Lama once said that “simplicity is extremely important for happiness” and it’s true! Complexity is a huge source of stress and anxiety at work. For AP professionals, complexity can lead to increased errors, longer work hours, and frustration.
This is where integrated AP automation and tools can help. We love to create more ease by helping unblock the areas of your workflow that cause the greatest congestion. For example, our automatic vendor validation tool saves countless hours of time logging into external websites to manually verify vendor data by using artificial intelligence to check entries and flag any errors or warnings.
At Mekorma, ease is reflected in our approach to product design with a focus on simplicity. It is also reflected in our commitment to quality control and support, ensuring you never feel alone.
Control: “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” - Benjamin Franklin
Feeling out of control or overwhelmed at work leads to distress and burnout. On the flip side, having control over your work and process creates greater flow, confidence, and freedom.
We created the Mekorma Payment Hub to empower a more efficient, secure, and vendor-friendly AP ecosystem, ultimately contributing to better financial management and stronger business partnerships. Within the Payment Hub, AP teams benefit from greater control over fraud prevention and vendor data by using our automatic vendor validation solution, which includes OFAC (Office of Foreign Asset Control) verification. By curating a centralized system for quicker batch creation and approvals, we also help to reduce the time-to-pay cycle, fostering stronger vendor relationships for your organization, and capturing early payment discounts.
When you’re in control, you’re calm, focused, and present. You can do your best work and feel your best in this ideal state of being.
Care: “Never believe that a few caring people cannot change the world. For, indeed, that’s all who ever have.” - Margaret Mead
We see you. We hear you. AP can be a tedious and challenging profession, but it doesn’t need to be. When we hear stories of organizations or individuals struggling with boring, mind-numbing tasks, we don’t just shrug our shoulders and move on. We know we can help.
Our Action Board was created to solve a customer’s need for a less soul-killing workday. This AP team member worked for a large company with a shared AP department administering about 40 companies. Her job was to select payments and print checks for 40 hours a week making for an incredibly monotonous work week. She was burnt out and at the end of her rope. By using Mekorma solutions for Shared Services-Multi-Entity, she freed up time to upskill and move into a more fulfilling and impactful role.
That’s why Mekorma exists. To solve problems that are negatively affecting AP professionals and businesses. When you feel cared for, listened to, and seen, even heavy burdens feel lighter. You don’t have to go it alone. Consider us your “Samwise Gamgee”. We can’t carry the ring for you, but we can lighten the load by helping to ease the journey.
To us, AP Wellness is vitally important to organizational success and individual health. The high levels of AP team burnout and stress need to be addressed, and we’re committed to being part of the solution.
Have an idea or pain point you want to discuss with us? We’d love to hear from you!
