One of the easiest ways to achieve outstanding, or olympic, results in any function is to avoid simple blunders. This is definitely true when it comes to accounts payable. The February issue of Accounts Payable Now & Tomorrow identified ten such blunders. Here’s the start of the article with some of the blunders listed.

There are so many places where things can—and do—go wrong in accounts payable it would make your head spin. In truth, there are numerous quite simple things that anyone can do to make sure that their accounts payable operation runs as efficiently as possible. Unfortunately, some of these tactics are overlooked and end up costing the companies involved dearly—with money leaking to the bottom line or just eating into staff time and productivity. What follows is a list of common blunders that can lead to trouble in accounts payable. Hopefully, you’ve dodged them all.

1) Did not put ACH blocks on accounts where debits were not permitted.

2) Did not make sure your staff understood that credits are money owed your organization not obligations to be paid.

3) Forgot to ask for an extension to file 1099 information—and had to hustle to meet the deadline.

The rest of this article, including the seven other blunders, is in the February 2010 issue of Accounts Payable Now & Tomorrow. It also contains articles on proof of payment when paying electronically, best practices when moving to an ACH platform, addressing the sales and use tax “exempt or not” quandary, five tactics to use when vendors try to charge for paper invoices, best invoice receipt practices, NRA withholding basics, two unclaimed property myths detonated, and, of course, two pages packed with short tips and strategies.

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Here’s a nifty little tip that will certainly help accounts payable with its master vendor file headaches.

Before setting a new vendor up in your master vendor file, check not only to see if the name has already been entered, but check if any other vendor in the file has the same address or TIN. This step will only take an extra minute or two but could save your company a lot of money but preventing inadvertent duplicate payments.

It’s the little strategies like this that add up and could make you an AP Super Bowl winner.

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