1099 season is exhausting. Everyone has to file them and everyone has questions.

Over at The Accounts Payable Network, members have inundated our popular Ask the Expert feature with questions. These typically take the form of “we made a payment to X, do we have to report?” One issue that seems to be particularly tricky for AP departments is payments for medical services.

Happy New Year! This is the time of year when we evaluate our shortcomings and strive to improve. While this practice is usually associated with our personal lives, there is no reason why you can't apply it to working in accounts payable. AP organizations should always be looking for ways to work more efficiently and inexpensively.

While the overall spend that organizations put on their purchasing cards continues to grow every year, benchmark data shows that the growth is slowing. In addition, the percentage of organizations that have implemented p-card programs has remained essentially unchanged for the last two years.

However, this data is far from a sign that p-cards are on the way out. In fact, the opposite is true. P-cards are now a mainstay in a majority of accounts payable departments and the slowdown speaks more to the explosive growth seen during the past decade.

While paper invoices are still king, electronic invoices continue to make gains. Almost one-fourth of organizations currently receive some invoices electronically, with even more planning to implement e-invoicing systems during the next few years.

According The Accounts Payable Network’s Automation Benchmark Survey 2011 preliminary results, 24 percent of participants stated that they have implemented electronic invoicing. In a 2009 survey, just 10 percent had implemented the technology. The percentage of organizations receiving invoices electronically more than doubled in two years.