Abstract: The value of accounts payable (AP) training to an organization should not be underestimated. Because AP touches every department within an organization, it’s essential that training reach beyond departmental boundaries and blend AP’s internal business partners into the mix. Leading finance and AP managers believe that a well-structured training curriculum can improve productivity by a minimum of 15 percent, while poorly conceived courseware can severely hinder both morale and motivation.

The scope of AP training should also go beyond the nuts and bolts of paying invoices. The manager of today and the supervisor of tomorrow can each benefit from improved business communication, employee coaching, and team-building skills. And as traditional organizational boundaries continue to blur, AP employees will need to be well-versed in a wide array of business skills.

Tailor the Training

Clothing comes in all shapes and sizes. That’s because not everyone is the same size, nor do they have the same tastes or needs in clothing. The same is true with food. Salsa, for example, comes in mild, medium and hot flavors to match the discerning pallets of different individuals. If manufacturers only offered one style of pants or one type of salsa, the impact would likely be a rapid loss of sales.

The same can be said when it comes to AP training. Tom Nichols, a former director of financial operations for AT&T’s corporate payroll and AP financial services, found that out when the company attempted to train employees on newly-installed technologies.

“We came up with a generic training program because we thought one size would fit all,” Nichols recalls. “But we found that older employees, those who had been with the company 15 or 20 years, were afraid of the new technology and took longer to adjust to it. We had to plan out an additional two or three weeks of training for them.”

There are also different levels of training within AP. New employees need to learn basic technical skills such as how to navigate their way through the system. Current employees often undergo continuing education to learn new skills and ensure that existing skills remain sharp. On the less technical side, soft-skills training focuses more on areas like employee coaching, team building, and business communication –different skill sets for different individuals within an AP department. And they’re all critical in terms of their overall impact on an organization.

“What a lot of people don’t realize is that AP touches every single department within a corporation,” explains Leslie Noffsinger, concept manager with San Francisco, Calif.-based Williams-Sonoma. “When people are not properly trained in AP, it can create a real mess for the company. It becomes a domino effect.”

Basic Training

Early in 2002, Gap, Inc. moved its AP operations from the company’s headquarters in California’s Silicon Valley to a shared service center in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Thirty out of 300 people made the move, so the AP department ended up with about 270 new employees. Deb Vander Bogart, senior director of financial operations, and one of the 30 who made the move, recalls the manner in which the company trained the many new employees.

“We had a training program that encompassed a lot of classroom, instructor-led training,” says Vander Bogart. “But we also did one-on-one training where everyone had his or her own coach. We took a transition approach where employees would watch a demonstration, then they would participate with the coaches guiding them.”

Basic AP training focuses on policies and guidelines for invoice payment, internal audit practices, approval procedures, and an overview of people and departments within a company. And according to Noffsinger, it can last at least one month.

“We do almost a solid week of training, followed by three weeks of side-by-side, where employees buddy up and work together,” Noffsinger explains.

Interdepartmental Training

In addition to training AP staff, interdepartmental training about AP and AP policies is another program that can return benefits to a company. Frequent interaction between AP and its internal business partners requires a collaborative effort that can be successful only when each department understands its role and responsibility within that working arrangement.

Business partner training also offers the opportunity to go beyond processes and policies to include the role and importance of payables in the business – its impact on cash flow and vendor relations, its capability for spend analysis, etc. Business partner training, approached correctly, can increase business partners’ understanding, leading to better relations and cooperation, ultimately enhancing operations in AP.

The Gap has a program it calls AP University, where business partners from other departments attend sessions on how to get invoices paid. “It’s set up like a University setting,” Vander Bogart explains. “We have course listings and the time slot during the day when the courses are given. Employees can attend all or part of the sessions. There’s also a small graduation ceremony for those who attend all the sessions.”

Those types of sessions are invaluable, says Noffsinger, who was senior director of corporate AP at the Gap before assuming her current position with Williams-Sonoma. Prior to the training, she recalls, business partners did not know how to properly code an invoice or have knowledge of approval procedures. “All of that is critical in terms of information flow,” Noffsinger points out. “If you train AP business partners as well as AP staff, it will clean up the messes that you are dealing with on the back end.”

Vander Bogart adds that if a business partner is new to the company, they’re afforded a few months to get settled in and learn the process. After that, if a business partner who deals with AP on a regular basis continually fails to follow appropriate processes, a document?a sort of mini-University program?is sent to the business partner to help walk them through the program.

Impact of Poor Training

Just as a well-trained AP department can function like a fine-tuned engine, poorly trained employees, or those who receive no training at all, can negatively impact both the AP department and the company as a whole. But too often, says Randy Gartz, regional manager with Robert Half Finance and Accounting, there doesn’t seem to be a high enough regard for the talent of a well-trained AP professional and what that talent does for a company.

“AP personnel see the entire business cycle right there at their computer screens,” Gartz explains. “They become somewhat of a traffic cop in terms of the transfer of information both externally to the world that is servicing their company, and internally to their coworkers.”

Gartz believes that AP personnel, if given the proper authority and training, could successfully negotiate discounts for the company. “They’re talking to vendors all the time about outstanding invoices, so why not let them be the ones to negotiate the discounts. Sending an employee for negotiation training might cost $400, but if they can get a 10 or 15 percent discount off a volume of services from some of the company’s top vendors, that alone would help the company save significant dollars.”

At least AP can be trained to analyze the payables data on company spending and provide the results to purchasing, giving purchasing insight into actual spending and providing it with leverage in its dealings with vendors.

Nichols agrees that AP training can have a direct monetary impact on an organization. He notes that in today’s economic climate, AP staffs are under considerable pressure from chief financial officers to reduce costs. “Most of the potential for cost savings in accounts payable will come as a result of technology enhancement that eliminates the paper invoice,” Nichols explains. “Imaging and Workflow is high on the priority list with many AP organizations. But from my personal experience, full cost advantage will not materialize if associates are not trained properly.”

Viewed from the positive impact training can have, Noffsinger says she would chalk up, at the very least, a 15 percent productivity improvement just from proper training. “On a scale of one to ten, with one being that companies don’t even need to waste their time training their AP department and ten being that they better do it or the company will fall apart, I’d put the importance of AP training at a nine.”

Noffsinger also points out that the lack of AP training speaks volumes when it comes to the area of employee morale and motivation, especially when it relates to new employees. When new employees are not properly trained they become frustrated because they think they’re doing things wrong. Morale goes down, turnover goes up, and companies lose good people.

“What’s worse is that employees learn procedures second hand from a coworker, but a lot of times the coworker is wrong,” says Noffsinger. “The new employee gets reprimanded for doing something that were told by a coworker, and that has a huge impact on morale within the department.”

Determining Training Needs

At the Gap, every AP employee at every level has an individual development plan program, an itinerary of skills that will help take him or her to the next level. Each manager identifies the key components or success factors that his or her employees need to work on over the course of a year. The progress an individual makes in his or her development plan is monitored on a quarterly basis.

Determining who needs training and what the content of that training should be is not as easy as it might sound. What can help are individual assessment tools like the Predictive Index from Praendex. The tool is used to measure employees’ specific workplace drives, motivations and behaviors, as well as those of their managers. It’s a two-part form that measures how an individual is most naturally motivated to perform, and how that same individual changes in response to the demands of the job. The results can provide managers with a lot of information related to the kinds of training that are likely to be most effective for a given individual.

For example, AP is a highly task-focused type of work. But according to Dennis LaRosee, senior vice president of Praendex, there are some aspects of AP that also require skills like interpersonal communication. “There could be large conversion projects that require team communication. Knowing an employee’s profile would help a manager identify skills not necessarily natural to the individual, and that’s an early opportunity to begin a targeted training process.”

Information from the assessment tool can also provide important information about the way different employees learn. Knowing that, says LaRosee, enables AP departments to design training experiences specifically to meet the specific needs and learning styles of their employees. For example, that AP employees are, on average, highly structured individuals implies that a formal type of training methodology would be more effective than one that was loosely structured.

“Training a group of AP employees, it would be very important to set up the expectation for the curriculum in advance,” LaRosee explains. “Give the employees time to think about it. Also, design a curriculum that has lots of opportunity for individual learning, not just classroom lecturing.”

LaRosee stresses that a poorly designed training curriculum, or one that employees perceive is not right for them, can be very damaging beyond the obvious result that nobody wants to go to class. It can lower morale and motivation, as employees think, why am I wasting my time? On the other hand, a person coming out of a workshop who is energized by the experience feels empowered and is much more motivated to apply the concepts he or she just learned. “One of the most important parts of curriculum design and delivery is understanding the behavior patterns and motivation of people in the room,” LaRosee explains. “If that is done well, the energy in the room from the participants will contribute to the learning process for everyone.”

Beyond Basic Training

It’s easy to think of AP training as simply the nuts and bolts of paying invoices, because that’s what it used to be. Nichols recalls that in the past, most AP training was done on the job. The influx of new technologies has changed that. Companies can no longer afford, from a time and cost perspective, to have workers trained on the job. Separate training courses have become the norm.

Today, Nichols says business is moving into a stage where people are being defined as knowledge workers. That, he believes, is a scary proposition from an AP manager’s standpoint.

“People want to be more involved in the decisions that affect their jobs,” Nichols explains. “I think there’s a whole area of management training that’s necessary to move managers away from the command and control approach and into providing an atmosphere where people are allowed to participate in the decision-making process. Managers are moving into more of a coaching kind of role.”

Along those lines, courseware offered by SkillSoft, a leading provider of comprehensive, multi-modal e-learning content and software products for business and information technology professionals, can better prepare managers and supervisors for Nichols’ knowledge worker of tomorrow. Skills such as business communication, employee coaching, setting budgets and team building are important for managers and supervisors.

“From a management standpoint, having the ability to coach your team through its day to day jobs and keep it working well with other departments in the company can trickle down and impact an entire AP organization,” says Amy Rodman, product manager in charge of business skills content for SkillSoft. “But it’s not just about leadership training. Anyone in AP can benefit from improving his or her business skills, whether it’s communicating more effectively or having a better understanding of diversity issues. Training like that is relevant no matter what a person’s position might be.”

Nichols believes a broad set of business skills will become increasingly important over the next several years as traditional organizational boundaries continue to dissolve. He points out that for years, purchasing and AP employees wouldn’t even sit in the same room together. Now, however, a more collaborative environment is taking hold. “And with collaboration, there needs to be a better understanding on each department’s part of what the other folks do,” says Nichols. “So there’s a whole area of learning that will be necessary to break down the old silo effect. That could put more pressure on the part of AP personnel in terms of what they’re responsible for.”

Avoiding the Pitfalls

Whether developing a new AP training program or enhancing an existing one, if you choose to handle it in-house, Noffsinger cautions against assuming that your best AP person will be your best trainer.

“Normally you’d pick your best AP employee, hand them the procedure manual, and wish them luck, but you don’t really know what they’re saying to the individual when they’re training them. They could be the most impatient person or worst communicator in the world. You want to be careful of that because doing the work and teaching it are two totally different skill sets.”

Vander Bogart believes one of the biggest mistakes an AP department can make is the failure to document procedures and update manuals. Though they’re a hassle, she admits, because they’re time-consuming and boring, they’re very important. And included in that mix, she says, is policy documentation.

“It can be a real stumbling block for training from both an internal standpoint as well as training outside the AP department,” Vander Bogart explains. “If you don’t have your policy acts together, your business partners are going to stop listening to you.”

Nichols also stresses the importance of documenting and updating procedures. “I used to have a whole group of people working for me who did nothing but that. Things are changing rapidly in AP, so you not only need to document procedures but you need to have the infrastructure in place to make certain they are current. If you don’t stay on top of that, and if you don’t have people properly trained, you’re going to miss the curve.”

Above all else, Vander Bogart says that in order to derive the most value from AP training, it’s essential for everyone to be on the same page. “When we made the move from San Francisco to Albuquerque we learned that we had a lot of different ways of doing the same thing. And that was a danger sign for us because it meant we had a real inconsistent teaching method going on. So sometimes you have to back up the truck and make sure everyone starts at the beginning.”