Last week, I volunteered to be a camp counselor/coach at basketball overnight camp for inner city kids.

After 5 days and 4 nights with wakeup calls at 7:00am and "lights out" at 11pm, I was completely and utterly exhausted.  My "team" consisted of 10 fifth and sixth graders -- each one was a good kid but a few had very little respect for authority, most had very short attention spans and all of them had extraordinary excuse-making abilities.

(In hindsight) there were several amusing incidents.  One of my kids (let's call him D) was a chronic liar.  One morning during our dribbling drills, for no apparent reason, D smacked a teammate on the head.  Almost everyone saw him do it.

"Why the heck did you hit Mark?" I asked as Mark was rubbing his head and crying.

D threw up his arms in disbelief.  "What?!?  Why do I get blamed for everything!  Coach, I didn't do anything.  I swear."

No number of pushups could extract even a half-hearted apology from D.  Instead, D concocted one of the best excuses I have ever heard - "Coach, I could tell that Mark was thinking of hitting me first so I HAD to defend myself."  Now, even with my patience running very thin, I had to admire the creativity of that excuse.

I had another kid (let's call him O) who came to this 5 day overnight camp with ONE pair of shorts and ONE pair of underwear. 

O's "dirty laundry" solution?  

Steal other campers' shorts and skivvies, of course!  It was hard not to chuckle dealing with the "daily undie theft" but the sad part was that Oliver really didn't understand that "borrowing without permission" was wrong.

This is how my week went - it was truly an exercise in patience as the kids always had some excuse for their (mis)behavior.  Yes, we actually played some basketball, learned some things and had some fun -- but managing and supervising these kids was an all-consuming task from the moment I woke up to the moment I put my head down on my pillow.   A co-worker here at 170 Systems joked that my experience with these kids sounded similar to babysitting invoice approvals from business managers in the field.  It's actually a pretty good analogy.  How much time do AP Professionals waste chasing down approvals?  How many paper invoices have really been "lost?"  How many lame excuses can field approvers fabricate for procrastinating on approvals? 

We all know that accurate approvals and authorizations are a critical internal control.  A robust approval process should ensure that accurate approvals are obtained in a timely manner with accountable audit trails that are tracked in real-time.  From a bottom-line perspective, late approvals also cost money in missed discounts, late fees and productivity-sapping "where's my payment" inquiries.

To minimize the amount of time you have to spend babysitting approvals, you HAVE to do approvals online.  If you are still signing things on pieces of paper, making copies, mailing stuff, matching with signature books, etc. ... then a significant part of each AP Staffer's day will be wasted babysitting approvals and enduring excuses.  To free yourself from approval "daycare," the approval process must be systematic, on-line and have full security controls.

Let me ask you this: How many times have invoices been paid late because of tardy approvals and then AP gets the blame!  Automating AP through technologies such as workflow and imaging can encourage timely approvals with automated routing based on configurable business rules for appropriate spending levels, e-mail reminders and escalations.  With escalations, if you receive an invoice and ignore it, you will get a reminder.  If you ignore that reminder you may get a second reminder. Finally, if you procrastinate too long on the approval, the approval will automatically be escalated to your boss. It usually takes one invoice to be escalated once and then all of a sudden you have timely approvals. It's amazing to witness this change in behavior when approvers realize the process is systematic, controlled and tracked such that there are ramifications if approvals are not carried out in a timely fashion.  With this type of visibility into the approval process, not even D could come up with an excuse!

So, if you have approvers named D and O who always have a "dog ate my invoice" excuse for late approvals and don't understand that overdue approvals are wrong and cost the company money, consider the benefits of automating the approval process.

-Rakesh

 P.S.  So what are the best excuses you have heard from delinquent approvers?  Please let us know by posting a comment.