Growing & retaining AP teams: Lessons from finance & AP leaders

Attracting, developing, and retaining top AP talent is more challenging than ever. From finding the right employees to upskilling them for future growth, finance leaders must continuously evolve their approach to team development. In this session, AP and finance experts will share real-world experiences on how they’ve tackled these challenges, what strategies have worked (or haven’t), and how technology can help teams do more with less—without burning out employees.

Zone & Co’s Joseph Scavotto, Sr. Director of Global Solution Consulting, as he interviews Saut Sinaga, VP, Corporate Controller, and Curt McKinney, Director, Corporate Accounting discuss:

• The biggest hiring and retention challenges in AP today
• How to upskill employees and create career growth opportunities
• Lessons learned from managing AP teams
• The role of technology in supporting, not replacing, employees

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Transcript

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Joe Scavotto: So we will get started here today. Thank you everyone for joining for this webinar: Growing and Retaining AP Teams.

Today, I'll be your host. My name is Joe Scavotto I'm the Senior Director of Global Solution Consulting here at Zone. I started my career off in accounting and finance, working at Deloitte and General Motors. And then I transitioned into pre-sales solution consulting, really helping companies look at automation tools.

Today we're joined by two great guests, Saut Sinaga and Curt McKinney. I'll let them do a quick introduction for themselves.

Saut Sinaga: Hey everyone, yes. Saut Sinaga here VP Controller at Zone. I joined Zone about six months ago today. My background has mostly been in software. So yeah, no, it's good to be here and thanks for having me here today.

Joe Scavotto: Great. Thanks, Saut.

Curt McKinney: Hey everyone. My name is Curt McKinney. I'm the Director of Corporate Accounting here at Zone. I started my career at KPMG. I, I'm a CPA and I've kind of been through multiple industries of industrial, commercial-based, project-based companies. And I'm grateful to be here at Zone.

Joe Scavotto: Great. Thanks Curt.

So with that, let's dive right in. So who is Zone? So, Zone is a, a company that has built a series of applications directly on the NetSuite platform. We have over 4,000 customers globally with a team of more than 250 resources across three continents. Like I said, our focus is on the NetSuite ecosystems and we have a number of product focusing from ZoneBilling, which helps companies on the invoice automation and billing and revenue recognition.

We have a ZoneCapture and ZoneApprovals, so helping companies bring in vendor bills and approval matrices in a more streamlined fashion. We help companies with bank reconciliation, with our ZoneReconcile product, helping that period close, really be more efficient. And then we also enable customers leveraging Stripe to be able to directly integrate that into NetSuite via our ZonePayments product.

We do have a number of reporting tools, including ZoneReporting, which allows you to see all of your data inside of Power BI. And then Solution 7, giving people the ability to see their data from NetSuite directly in Excel. We have a lot of accountants here today, so we all love Excel at the end of the day. It's a powerful tool. So we're really enabling you to actually see that kind of live data directly in the Excel platform.

And finally, we do empower companies from a global payroll perspective with our ZonePayroll offering.

So with that, I did wanna actually hop into the interview and as we begin our conversation today, we're really going to be taking a look at how can we empower AP teams through AP automation, but also focusing from a retention perspective.

And I think of scaling companies and the ability to keep and retain employees, but also develop their skills as well. So my first question today is going to be for, for Saut, and what does your current AP department look like and how does individual growth play a factor when you link it with an AP automation tool?

Saut Sinaga: Yeah, maybe I'll tie it back here to the whole accounting. To the whole accounting team, right? And, and I'd like to see it as a fireside chat session instead of an interview. So you guys feel free to ask any questions. I see you see fit. So, as a controller. I always want to have the best in class team and world class process and the biggest investment that I always have to make is going to be around people and their team development. Right?

And attracting, going back all the way to attracting top talent and human capital development are always going to be the two focus area that I often prioritize as a leader. And it is obviously aside from the work from doing the work itself, right.

Every time I have an open role, Curt and I have to compete for the top talent against other companies out there, not just for individual contributer roles, but we're talking about manager, even director roles. And once they've joined our team, the challenge does not stop there. Right?

How can I continue to uplevel their learning experience? Because what I have found here is that many top performers are always hungry to learn. They're always eager to do more, and they're always looking for ways to be more efficient and look for ways to better themselves.

So really my job is, is to enable them so that, so that they can continue to grow within the organization. At the end of the day, you know, accounting is usually going to be the very leanest team out there. Right now we have about two headcounts that does AP functions right now and really going back to the human capital management and development there.

The key points are how do we attract the top talents to join the team and once they've joined the team, how do we develop them so they can continue to grow within an organization?

Joe Scavotto: Awesome. And, and Curt to, to kind of take that last point. So how do we develop them, wanting to keep them, but also to grow them? Because one of the things that I've noticed over the past few years is finance is taking a bigger seat at the table, getting more involved in more departments. When I think historically they're kind of on the backside they had the smallest leanest team. That's just the, the nature of finance.

How does that kind of evolve and with your focus on developing individuals?

Curt McKinney: Yeah, that's a great question. So when you come into a role as an AP either analyst or financial accountant or even AP manager there's a lot of ordinary daily tasks that take a lot of time. And, and without automation, you spend 80% of your day doing those ordinary daily tasks.

But with automation, you're able to then go and do the the tasks that grow you professionally within your career, giving you more time to strategize around days payable outstanding or your DPO metric, or being able to help the CFO kind of see, what are our top 10 vendors that we're spending with, and is there a way that we could extend out terms.

So as you start to get more and more outside of of those daily ordinary tasks kind of trimming down those hours, you're able to do the stuff, the analysis, the data and analytics piece of your respective department, which I found personally which has kept me kind of, sharp between the ears, if you will as an accountant and kept me coming to work each day because I learned something new. I do something new each day. But with any role and any, any responsibilities you're going to have those daily tasks that you'll have to do. And, and if not set up correctly, those daily tasks could be what you do each day a hundred percent of the time. Or with automation and streamlining the process, it gives you more time to do things outside of that purview of those daily tasks that can get you noticed in a company that can grow your career and then obviously grow you professionally and personally.

Saut Sinaga: And another point that I want to add here, Joe. Curt brought up some really good points, and I think it's a very important question as well. The, the, the reality here, and unfortunately, AP, AR or even collections functions are typically being seen as back of the office function. Right?

But they, they should be viewed as your trusted partners because they're so much closer to the action than the leaders. They're so much closer to the process. And I personally leverage their skill sets and their knowledge to complement my decision making process as well. And by doing this, you are indirectly developing them to, to become a strategic partner to you.

Joe Scavotto: Yeah. And I kind of hear you both kind of alluding to this: automation frees the individual almost.

It, it is empowering them to wanna grow their own career, right? But also give them some level of curiosity to say, Hey, maybe we can look at terms, but maybe talk about how those analysis maybe help transform the business. Like you made a comment about transforming terms, right? But maybe we can look at information of, hey, are we leveraging, early term supplier discounts or, hey, we're spending significant with the supplier, maybe we can renegotiate.

So maybe kind of talk a little bit about that.

Curt McKinney: Yeah, certainly. So what I tell my teams traditionally is find the top two or three areas that you spend most of your days on. And let's do, and I call it the three S's, let's simplify it, let's streamline it, let's standardize it. Simplification. We have a real life example here at Zone over the last couple months where they're, we, we were using multiple emails to enter in the invoices into NetSuite.

An email was a legal entity, so we were able to then condense all those emails into one. And we were able to then, instead of going and tracking down that email and making sure it gets to the right person or the right legal entity, we are able to streamline the process by saving us a couple minutes each, each, each invoice, which extrapolated, is a lot of time.

So we were able to simplify the process that way and streamlining figuring out a way to automate the data entry within NetSuite, getting source documents into NetSuite automatically through a tool or a solution. And then obviously roll it out across multiple legal entities, which is the standardization of that process.

So when, when you're able to do that and then scale it out for the whole company and you look at the time savings from a measurement standpoint it can be a rather large number than than expected. And it also then gives us time back to where we can spend on more higher value items, such as analyzing our spend with customer.

I know I mentioned maybe extending terms, but maybe we, if we do a certain amount of spend with a particular customer, maybe we have discounts that we could take advantage of in the future as well. Which can then lower our cost. So these are certain strategies that people that as Saut mentioned, are closer to the data closer to seeing trends that could be used as a strategic partner with other departments within the company.

Joe Scavotto: Yeah, I really like how you kind of, you touched upon the having the employees kind of, maybe kind of be the, some of the genesis of these ideas. Like what, what is taking me a long time to do these activities every single day, every single the week. It kind of goes in that personal development. And one thing Saut is your background comes from some scaling companies, right?

What does that allow you to do? Right? From one, maybe a cost side of the house, right? Going 2, 3, 5 x in ARR, right? But also from that retention side. And how have you seen that development? Maybe from an AP clerk?

Saut Sinaga: Yeah.

Joe Scavotto: Throughout their journey.

Saut Sinaga: Yeah, so I like, I like this mode right here. It's called scalability through automation.

How can you uplevel the process that you have developed today through automation? That way you can get the output that you want in a much more streamlined and efficient manner. Right? At the same time, you're increasing the data accuracy, reliability, and also remove the manual work that your team has been doing.

That goes into our software evaluation every time we evaluate a new software that we're trying to buy, right? We need to understand what is the problem that we're trying to solve today, and how can the software help my team scale? And in the past I had this mindset about don't fix it if it's not broken.

But that mindset becomes a clear blocker for me, best in class, instead of thinking about it that way. I shifted the direction in a way that, how can I be 1% better every day? How can my team be 1% better every day? So what that does is that it removes some of the manual work from my team and have them to focus on a value added task, on a more strategic task, right?

Hey, let's the, let the automation handle some of these manual data entry stuff, right? And instead give me some of the analysis that I need to have in order for me to make a decision. So it empowers them, right? It empowers my team by potentially embracing a culture of transparency as well, because it, it gives them another point of view about things instead of just doing data entry stuff. Right. And then by having this transparency also fosters, fosters a culture of cross collaboration as the employee than are more likely to feel valued and engaged when they understand the financial health and the direction of the company just by looking at the data themselves.

And again, celebrate wins, right? Celebrate some of these wins that we accomplish. Even if it's small. By doing that, it gives them a sense of accomplishment and describe how, how their work really matters for the, for the growth of the company.

Joe Scavotto: Yeah. Have you seen any examples where maybe a company wasn't pro automation or pro technology or, Hey, the finance isn't going to get a budget for this to this year.

How it's negatively impacted an organization, right. Maybe from loss of employees. I assume burnout's a real thing if you're just doing a same repetitive task day in and day out. So have you seen any of the neg negative impacts of not going with automation? Like you said, don't fix it if it's not broken, but what, what was some of those downstream impacts?

Saut Sinaga: Yeah, I mean this is going back to my earlier points about top performers, right? Top performers are always hungry to learn. They're eager to do more and always looking for ways to be more efficient and do things better if you are not able to enable these top performers and keep them doing all of these manual entry stuff. You are not enabling them to grow within an organization.

Then at that point you're not creating an environment where you can learn and grow within the organization. So it's really going back to the philosophy of like, how can we enable them to do more, to avoid, to avoid any burnt out.

But let's be real here. When I first had my first accounting role it was a 9-5, I think 8-5 role. And all I have to do was data, data entry, right? And it didn't, I was becoming a really good processor at that point, really good processor.

But what's missing there is that I need to become a thinker. I need to start thinking outside of the box, but my leader at that point was not enabling me to do so. So what's the point of me being here? Right? So I want to do more. I wanna, I wanna take advantage of the situation and do more and grow within my career. So us as a leader, we need to be able to en enable that to avoid to avoid any burnout.

Joe Scavotto: It sounds that, that sounds wonderful. Because it does sound like there could be a direct correlation between that technology and automation and maintaining those employees because burnout's real, like we, we've all kind of been there in those manual processes job without seeing the light at the end of that tunnel, it becomes difficult to see, well, what's my future at x, y, and Z company? Right? Where am am I going from here? Right. I'm maybe a, a new, maybe just left external audit and looking for a new career, but you're going into just day-to-day entry and it's a, it's a big transition, but it's also, as you know, you want to take strong individuals and grow them.

Saut Sinaga: Absolutely.

Yeah. I think that the turning point, for me at least, was. It was a mindset around, man, I, I was, I, I was really becoming a really good processor at this point. I need to grow within my career. Right. And I learned from that experience and I applied to to my team these days as well.

Joe Scavotto: Curt, early in your career, you, you talked about coming from KPMG and making the transition from public accounting, ever up against that, that battle of a, Hey, I think we could do something more here if we were given a tool. Right? Or, have you advocated for getting X, y, and Z tools to make your job easier, but to empower those projects.

I always love special projects, right? It's like they're fun, they're excited. So what's kind of been your direct experience there?

Curt McKinney: Yeah. So coming out of public and going into industry. Obviously is an adaptation in and of itself with the hours and the roles and and whatnot.

But I was fortunate enough to where I was able to get into a role where I was kind of taking a driver's seat point of view to driving change, driving process improvements. And, and streamlining some analysis and whatnot. And, and, and it really helped me personally have a, I guess a, I guess you could say, a greater stake in the company where I could point to a process that's currently being presented to leadership as something that I built from the ground up.

That I was able to then get to the point where it was showing us great results month in and month out and being able to, to drive change that way. And obviously, you know, some companies and some individuals are against change depending on what it is. But I think only thing that's consistent in this world is change.

And I think with change becomes better systems, better processes and then from a people standpoint, just as Saut alluded to earlier, let's get better 1% each day. Obviously that compounds over multiple days, multiple years, and you'll look back 10 years and see how much you've grown as an individual.

But for me personally, it was, it was for me to take a, which I, I do currently for my team now, is to take a process and being able to take it from one part, raw materials, bring it to a whip, and then obviously finished goods. And the finished goods is so that we can rely on month in and month out to potentially find an error or find a misclassification at some point. Or being able to add some agility to our reporting and versatility to our reactions to our actions. Be less reactionary, more proactive. Being able to see trends a few months out.

But I think that's probably what, what, what got me into the day-to-day and, and kept me away from burnout was I was able to be empowered as an employee and being able to take these processes on my own, build 'em up, and then being able to to scale it out for the company.

Joe Scavotto: Yeah, I really like that. I think one of the key components that you mentioned is, the leadership buy-in is kind of a must, right? We, we need to empower the, the individuals to, to take on those, those opportunities. There's always going to be a little bit of manual entry and thinking through some past experiences working with a lot of companies and ones that maybe don't move as fast in the automation direction and the results of scaling companies two, three x ARR. Well, AP teams are growing at the same rate.

Curt McKinney: Exactly.

Joe Scavotto: And that to me is not allowing you as a company to get those insights and so what does it mean for you if you could, look at your day payables outstanding in a better real time, maybe not 15 days after month end.

What does that allow you as a decision maker to be able to do?

Saut Sinaga: Yeah. Me as a controller, no surprise is a good surprise. Even though if it's a good surprise.

Even though we're going to get more cash, even though we're going to pay less, no surprise is a good surprise. Everything have to be controllable.

Control what you can control. Right. And by enabling Curt and team to give them this layer of visibility, he then able to send me signals. Right. And then I use the signals to make my decisions.

Joe Scavotto: Yeah. It's to me that, that, that insight and those people moving away from the day-to-day entry, they know so much about their, their sub vendors and their suppliers.

Right.

Did you get the right rate? But if you're just a data entry person, just all you're doing, you have a stack of 500 bills in your desk, it's pretty easy to miss something. Right? Or to your point. Maybe you did get a supplier discount over 500,000 in annual spend, but you have no way of tracking it and it's manual, but you still have 499 vendor bills to enter in.

Did you even take advantage of that? Right. To me, that's a lost opportunity. Right? So this is really what it's, it's allowing us to empower the company, the organization, but more importantly, that employee because that employee's going to feel more attached to that company. 'cause they're going to help them grow.

Saut Sinaga: Exactly. So understand the data is a huge point there so that way you can paint a really good story and then make the news, right. And that's the one thing that the AP team may, may be missing because they're off being often being seen as a backup of the office function, making the news, but understanding the data, you're able, you're able to send signals and paint better story around it.

Joe Scavotto: Yep. Absolutely. All right, so we're going to do some quick polls as as we're wrapping up our interview here today. Curt, so thank you very much for diving in with us today. So today first question is, what is your biggest challenge in growing and retaining your AP team?

The, the big focus was managing increasing workloads with limited staff and reducing errors in efficiencies in AP processes. Right? Kind of what we've been talking about this whole time, how we're growing that team, right from a company perspective and even retaining top talent is how do we manage that?

And I think with that AP automation like we've been discussing is really going to help. Keep people, grow them individuals, but also at the same time reduce those errors. Right. And individuality is in AP process, so it's kind of twofold here. Anything else you guys want to chime in here with?

Saut Sinaga: I was, I was going to, you No, I was going to say no. This this poll results really, really going back to how do we how do you embrace the culture of scalability through automation, right? The work will keep coming your way, but how do you manage this workload?

And I think we could potentially leverage technology to reduce some of these manual work.

Joe Scavotto: Absolutely. Right. And we have one more poll as well.

So, where is your company in its AP automation journey?

I think this is pretty good, 'cause I think this is also one of those things that we can always, constantly be evaluating. So as you, as everyone is filling out this poll, I. Seems to be a big trend towards partially automated. Some manual processes still remain, right? So never be, to me, never be satisfied with that status quo.

I remember from college, the, the Six Sigma kinda mentality there. But I think it is great to think about, right when you're running the AP team running organizations. I think it's important to always have that mindset and look for ways. Look for opportunities to have that automated and really reduce the risk, is the way I see it.

Saut Sinaga: Absolutely.

Joe Scavotto: All right. So just as we wrap up, so some of the great things about some of our solutions is we're really looking at from a faster and more accurate capturing of those invoices. Being able to have those approvals be from anywhere, be it from the mobile phone or have alerts and mechanisms to, to track that, but also be able to manipulate as well.

And then lastly, from, and close with bank rec, right? These are some of the tools that we do offer that allow AP organizations to close the book fast, but also to reduce those manual tasks.

So we did wanna open up for any Q&A. One that just came in and pretty interesting for, for me as well, is any advice for managers and controllers hiring from public accounting, right, is it is a different mindset, right? You're looking at the books a little bit differently versus the doer. So, so maybe from a hiring perspective than someone who's gone through that, what's been your experience? So, Saut go ahead.

Saut Sinaga: Yeah, no, I mean some of these people are really, really strong accountants, right? And most of these people are really, really strong accountants. And sometimes the transition from public accounting to the corporate, corporate world to the, to the industry could be a little bit challenging sometimes.

And that's what we have to do as a leader, right? How do we how do we shift the mindset from a project accounting mindset, so to speak, to an operational accounting mindset, because they're going to be looking at the book from a different angle, a different perspective. Now they're trying to understand how do we get to from point A to point B instead of just looking at the answer, just instead of just looking at the outcome or reviewing the outcome.

So that's, that's the process that we have to go through right now. And it's, it is me as, as as a mentor sometimes as a controller as well. It's been a pretty enjoyable process to see them grow and learn new stuff because this is a different perspective that they, that, that they never have.

Curt McKinney: Yeah, I would say coming from public accounting in the industry it's a big mindset shift. You're looking at the books as Sal mentioned, from a different lens from a different perspective and to assimilate into the industry versus public accounting.

You're used to going from client to client testing high complex accounts, or having meetings with CFOs and, and talking status of audits and so on and so forth to where you're now at one company. You're looking to put your fingerprints on this company and, and being able to show your value and add your value.

And I think, keeping those ordinary daily tasks that need to be done and automate those tasks and giving you more time to look at the more complex pieces within the process of each company. I think that's what would help retain the, talent from, from the public accounting spectrum.

Joe Scavotto: Yeah. Makes sense. Thank you. And then we got a three part question is what is the benefits of closing the books early? What's the advantage of technology that you've experienced and what do you use?

Curt McKinney: So what is the benefit of closing the books early? I've always been, in any role that I've been in, I've always been a big proponent of versatile and agile reporting. So the quicker that you can get your reporting, the quicker you can make the decision down the road of what you need to do, whether it be a CapEx expenditure or acquiring our company and being less reactionary and being more proactive.

So if you're closing the books in 15, 20 days. You have a week left until you're closing the books again for the month. But if you get down from 15 to a five day close, you've gained two full weeks back operationally to where you can then make your decisions on how is my cash flow looking, what are my networking capital or cash conversion cycle metrics, doing, is there something we could be doing from an M&A standpoint?

And then the advantage of technology that I've experienced. I've, I've experienced a significant cut down on those daily ordinary tasks of entering in invoices checking and reviewing the vendor information. And then what I use personally is, is our ZoneCapture tool to do that for the for the invoice processing.

I think we've quantified it and I think we saved three and a half to four minutes, I think, per invoice. Which extrapolated over a population of invoices a lot of time over a span of a month, which we then get back to to analyze the trends of, of our payables and trends of other accounts within our balance sheet and P&L.

Joe Scavotto: Yeah, that three and a half to four minutes per invoice. And at scale a hundred, 10,000 invoices per month. You would need an army just, just putting in data in the system. Saut any, anything to add there?

Saut Sinaga: No, I mean I think Curt hit all of the points there and one of the one of the benefits that I see from controller perspective is around resource optimization.

Right? By closing the book early, it allows us to focus on more the analysis side. Rather than the work of compiling the data or entering the data, then this shift enhances the productivity of my team and enable my team to spend more on valuable insight on, on providing valuable insights rather than managing some of the routine tasks.

Joe Scavotto: Makes sense. I do want to thank all of our participants and our panelists today. Really thank you both for going through this kind of the journey and evolutions of AP technology and retention and keeping those top tier employees and helping their careers develop. So I think this is tremendous insight today.

So again, thank you both and again, thank you to the individuals who joined as well.

Saut Sinaga: Thank you. Thanks for your time. Thanks.