Whois & Analysis for pathquest.com

Accounts payable (AP) is money owed by a business to its suppliers shown as a liability on a company's balance sheet.

It is distinct from notes payable liabilities, which are debts created by formal legal instrument documents.

An accounts payable department's main responsibility is to process and review transactions between the company and its suppliers and to make sure that all outstanding invoices from their suppliers are approved, processed, and paid.

The accounts payable process starts with collecting supply requirements from within the organization and seeking quotes from vendors for the items required.

Once the deal is negotiated, purchase orders are prepared and sent.

The goods delivered are inspected upon arrival and the invoice received is routed for approvals.

Processing an invoice includes recording important data from the invoice and inputting it into the company's financial, or bookkeeping, system.

After this is accomplished, the invoices must go through the company's respective business process in order to be paid.

A performance indicator or key performance indicator (KPI) is a type of performance measurement.

KPIs evaluate the success of an organization or of a particular activity (such as projects, programs, products and other initiatives) in which it engages.

KPIs provide a focus for strategic and operational improvement, create an analytical basis for decision making and help focus attention on what matters most.

Financial management is the business function concerned with profitability, expenses, cash and credit.

These are often grouped together under the rubric of maximizing the value of the firm for stockholders.

The discipline is then tasked with the "efficient acquisition and deployment" of both short- and long-term financial resources, to ensure the objectives of the enterprise are achieved.

A business process, business method or business function is a collection of related, structured activities or tasks performed by people or equipment in which a specific sequence produces a service or product (serves a particular business goal) for a particular customer or customers.

Business processes occur at all organizational levels and may or may not be visible to the customers.

A business process may often be visualized (modeled) as a flowchart of a sequence of activities with interleaving decision points or as a process matrix of a sequence of activities with relevance rules based on data in the process.

The benefits of using business processes include improved customer satisfaction and improved agility for reacting to rapid market change.

Process-oriented organizations break down the barriers of structural departments and try to avoid functional silos.

Accounting, also known as accountancy, is the processing of information about economic entities, such as businesses and corporations.

Accounting measures the results of an organization's economic activities and conveys this information to a variety of stakeholders, including investors, creditors, management, and regulators.

Practitioners of accounting are known as accountants.

The terms "accounting" and "financial reporting" are often used interchangeably.