Glean - Great product to do more with less and provide greater visibility to vendor spend
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Glean to manage, approve and track all vendor invoices and submit payments to our vendors. It solves multiple problems such as vendor invoice approval controls, spend tracking and management, general ledger entry, invoice payments, accrual and prepaid amortization schedules and entries, and so much much more. It's automated and its easy to use features enable us to save time and money on personnel for vendor management and AP as well as provide greater visibility on vendor spend across the entire organization.
Pros
- Efficiency: The tool automatically brings in and codes our invoices and pulls out relevant data, saving both time and personnel costs and allowing us to focus on higher-value initiatives to benefit our organization
- Cost: Much cheaper than adding a dedicated AP clerk and/or using other AP platforms that don't provide half as much benefit
- Automation: The prepaid amortization functionality and automated accruals help cut down on otherwise cumbersome manual workflows and make sure we don't miss anything in our close
- Visibility: Allowing each department and vendor approval to see historical trends and overall spend is so helpful in allowing them to build their budgets, better understand the source of increases/decreases, and overall monitor their vendors.
Cons
- Current limitation is that they don't (yet) support credit card programs. Once they are able to import/integrate with card programs to truly have all vendor spending in one place, they will be a must-have software for all accounting/finance teams.
Most Important Features
- Automated invoice entry
- Approval workflows
- Spend tracking
Return on Investment
- Has saved at least one fractional headcount from being needed to run AP for a fraction of the cost as well as freeing up additional time from having to do compilation of spend tracking and department sharing.
