Excerpted from the January 2010 issue of Accounts Payable Now & Tomorrow.

Paper checks are costly, inefficient, and a huge headaches for those toiling away in accounts payable. Yet they remain the tool used to pay the majority of invoices, even at many organizations with the ability to pay electronically. To change this situation, it may be necessary to go on the offensive and find ways to grow your ACH program. It’s certainly worth the effort, given the nuisance of paper checks. What follows are seven assertive techniques to grow an ACH program be it one that is languishing or one that’s thriving but could use a little extra oomph.

Don’t overlook your Web site. Publish ACH information on the company Web site. Occasionally a vendor you might not have approached will want to participate. Make it easy. Also, if you are going to take this approach, include your vendor enrollment form on the site. Do this only if you are willing to include all vendors in the program. Otherwise, you may find your p-card vendors signing up for the program—and there goes your rebate.

The rest of this article, along with articles on: bank account takeovers that lead to unrecoverable transactions, AP New Year’s resolutions and how to keep them, 1099K (a new proposed IRS form), the Procurement/Finance Gap (an excerpt from a fine Baseware white paper), a naming convention check list you can use for your master vendor file, a look at recovery audits, and a overview of advanced 1099 issues for W-9s, are all in the January issue of Accounts Payable Now & Tomorrow. Of course, the issue also includes two pages of tips and strategies you can use to fine-tune your AP process.

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Purchase an electronic copy of the January 2010 issue of AP Now newsletter.

(c) 2010 Accounts Payable Now & Tomorrow and CRYSTALLUS, Inc.