Tag: Hyper Intelligent Automation

As we wrap up the first half of 2021, several parts of the world are still reeling under the impact of the successive waves of the pandemic. Maintaining business continuity and building resilience for predictable growth is an imperative for businesses across the world.  With industries gearing up for bullish economic weather, business leaders are leaving no stone unturned to remove all process bottlenecks that could pose hurdles in their resurgence strategies. Your Accounts Payable team plays a central role here, maintaining transactional integrity, ensuring sustainable cash flow, and powering your core business, often with limited and restricted resources.

Process modernization and optimization are key priorities for Accounts Payable teams that have already embarked on this transformational journey. According to the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic survey by the Association for Financial Professionals (AFP), 65% of businesses will move from paper payments to electronic formats, while 38% will rewire their internal procedures. Digitization will pave the way for smarter, more efficient processes, where employees need to spend far fewer person-hours to complete routine tasks, thus unlocking savings as well as ushering in an overall culture shift.

If your Accounts Payable team is already on this superfast transformation highway, here are five key takeaways for you:

1. Consolidate the digital forays of the previous year

The first step towards building a futuristic invoice processing strategy should be consolidating the fragmented digital transformation initiatives undertaken last year. In 2020, businesses had to adopt remote-friendly processes and support Accounts Payable teams as they started to work from home almost overnight. In some cases, this added to process complexity as simple in-person tasks (e.g., paper-based approvals) were no longer possible. Supplier/vendor network management also went digital, which has its own risks in the long term. At this point, it is vital to consolidate any point solutions you might have in place, take stock of vendor sentiment and any user experience bottlenecks they might be facing, and evaluate the projected total cost of ownership of your Accounts Payable systems beyond the pandemic.

2. Optimize cash flow to prepare for unexpected challenges

The pandemic left very little room for error in cash flow management, and this trend will continue in the second half of 2021 as economies recover and businesses return to their growth trajectory. A report by the International Labor Organization found that cash flow was the #1 problem faced by 4500+ companies in 45 countries worldwide. Improving Accounts Payable efficiency and modernizing your invoice processing strategy could help optimize cash flow. For instance, recommendations generated by cognitive technologies could suggest changes in the order of supplier payments that would maximize your cash on hand. These technologies can assign risk scores to every vendor and make sure that you gain from early payment discounts.

3. Upskill your AP team to perform and innovate

The year 2020 marked a tectonic shift in how we work, and this will have a lasting impact on workplace culture, how employees approach routine tasks, and their aspirations for the future. In the absence of a physical office and the physical presence of a professional community, inefficiencies in business processes became starker. Your employees are now less likely to be satisfied with repetitive, high-volume tasks in this ‘work from home’ season. There are two major action points for businesses through the year 2021. Eliminate mundane, iterative and non-fulfilling work wherever possible (this has typically been a chronic challenge for the Accounts Payable team). Employees who are freed up can be up-skilled to focus on more innovative work, such as in decision-making, the use of advanced technology systems, and discretionary problem-solving: essentially, tasks that machines cannot perform.

4. Adopt agile workflows to gain from dynamic economic weather

Through the rest of this year, businesses can look forward to a largely optimistic economic forecast, albeit with occasional regional curveballs on the way. In the last couple of quarters, we saw the International Monetary Fund revise its predictions several times, underscoring the need to stay agile and adaptive. In this context, rigid Accounts Payable workflows and monolithic processes will make it difficult to keep pace with fluctuating conditions. Instead, businesses must establish processes that are easy to configure – onboarding new suppliers with minimal risk or delays to support renewed demand, reconciling invoice exceptions and corrections seamlessly, and scaling up without adding complex approval red tape.

5. Leverage intelligent invoice processing automation to scale sustainably as you grow

The best-case scenario to look forward to this year is a rapid return to the original growth trajectories, aided by a resurging economy in 2021-2022. Businesses cannot afford to let speed-breakers such as inefficient processes, errors arising from human fatigue, and the risk of non-compliance, slow down this journey. The Accounts Payable function as a whole — and invoice processing, specifically — is part of the core of any organization. As the throughput of your Accounts Payable team increases, its invoice processing capability must focus on increasing straight through processing capacity. That way, it can scale in tandem to make profitability truly sustainable and mitigate the impacts of any further unprecedented disruptions. Strengthening this function using cutting-edge technology, helping your AP team and the supplier network, and the business as a whole should be a key agenda item in your strategy.

Your top strategic priority for the emerging future should be to remove the bottlenecks in the invoice processing function, and intelligent automation can play a key role here. Here are a few points to ponder:

• An intelligent automation solution can centralize the steps taken to digitize invoice processing in specific business units, regions, and teams amid the rushed switch to remote operations.
• It can equip your AP function with customizable supplier portals, AI/ML insights, and suggestions for decision-making based on your business rules, thus optimizing cash flow.
• It can ingest invoicing data from EDI file formats, XML/JSON files, mailbox attachments, and scanned images, making life simpler for your AP team working remotely; automated data extraction, validation, and exception handling further reduces repetitive manual work and probable errors.
• An end-to-end intelligent automation platform makes touchless processing a reality by supporting highly configurable workflows, where you can specify thresholds for manual approval, fraud signals, vendor prioritization and more, depending on changing market conditions.
• Invoice processing costs can be optimized as your business operations scale (thanks to a scalable solution architecture and volume-friendly pricing model), making the investment in digitalizing your Accounts Payable function truly sustainable for the long term.

Learn how JIFFY.ai’s intelligent Invoice Processing HyperApp has been enabling customers from various industries to prioritize these five capabilities. In fact, these are a part of our central value proposition to future-proof the Accounts Payable function. Drop an email to marketing@jiffy.ai today.

Even with all your enterprise-level digital adoption, accounts payable can still be one of the most paper-intensive departments in your organization. The team’s primary function, invoice processing, costs the company resources due to time-consuming and repetitive tasks, slow processing cycles and human-introduced errors. The longer you ignore the cost of manually processing invoices, the deeper the dents it tends to cause in your organization’s bottom line. Learn how the benefits of accounts payable automation can reverse that trend.

The True Cost of Your Invoice Processing Flow

The U.S. Institute of Finance & Management (IOFM) suggests that the cost of processing a single invoice can be anywhere between $1 and $21. Putting this into perspective, think of a mid-sized company that has approximately 1,000 invoices to process per month. They would lose significant money through the gaps caused by process inefficiency. AP automation benefits can help to solve those inefficiencies and reduce your invoice processing costs.

What Makes Invoice Processing Expensive?

Wondering how best to calculate the expense of processing invoices in your organization? The simplest way is to equate it with the costs of associated human effort. Typically, a member of your accounts payable team would take at least 30 minutes to process a single invoice. Considering the average salary of an accounts payable clerk in the U.S. is $43,917 (approximately $21 per hour), processing one invoice could cost $10.50.  For the mid-sized company mentioned earlier, this would add up to more than $10,000 every month.

And that’s not all! At this point, we’ve only discussed the base costs involved. But there’s more to it, such as:

• Cost of fixing manual errors: Invoice processing is highly susceptible to errors due to daily variances, volume-based pressure or sometimes even sheer human fatigue. To fix such errors on a paper invoice, you might have to spend a significant $53.50 to create a new document, communicate with different stakeholders and redact payments already made.
• Lost opportunity costs, such as discounts: Most vendors offer discounts for early payments, which can be as much as 2% to 5%. Manual invoice processing can create delays, causing the payment to miss the discount window.
• Strained vendor relationships: The inefficiencies related to manual invoice processing, such as delayed payments, payment redactions and multiple requests for the same information, can seriously damage your brand’s reputation in today’s vendor and supplier landscape. More severe mistakes could even harm long-term relationships, adding to your overall invoice processing costs.
• Physical costs, like storage and paper: Manual invoice processing goes together with paper-based processes, involving costs for physical file storage, stationery, etc. Unstructured hybrid systems can be even more expensive as the accounts payable team might have to switch between digital and paper formats, spawning duplication.
• Cost of efforts diverted from core functions: Finally, complex approval processes coupled with frequent exceptions call for measures by personnel outside the invoice processing team. Business leaders might have to intervene in invoice processing, and their valuable person-hours (which would otherwise be spent on higher-value functions) must be factored in.

What is Invoice Workflow Automation & STP?

Invoice automation and the benefits of accounts payable automation go beyond barebones e-invoicing, which only recreates paper processes in a digital format and replicates its inefficiencies. The intelligent automation of invoice processing leverages technology in a meaningful way to remove the bottlenecks in your accounts payable workflow, bringing human intervention down to near-zero. This enables straight-through processing, or STP, where automated technology manages the end-to-end invoice lifecycle, and the average handling time by humans is dramatically reduced.

6 AP Automation Benefits That Achieve STP and Help Reduce Invoice Processing Costs

According to McKinsey, intelligent automation can streamline 93% of tasks in payment processing. The stages of accounts payable automation include:

1. Extract Invoice Data Using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

AI/ML-based technology such as object recognition and optical character recognition (OCR) can extract data from scanned images, PDF snapshots, etc. and automatically populate the fields in your accounts payable system. Intelligent invoice extraction is compatible with country-specific EDI formats, XML/JSON files, scanned images and even mailbox attachments.

2. Set up A Custom Supplier Portal

The worst long-term issue caused by inefficient invoice processing is probably the erosion of trust in vendor relationships. The smart UX of an automated solution allows you to set up a digital portal where vendors and suppliers can choose their relevant forms, make data entries and enjoy seamless interactions with your invoice processing team.

3. Configure Workflows to Handle Exceptions

Among the many benefits of accounts payable automation, automated exception handling lets your accounts payable staff tackle complex invoice scenarios without claiming the time of multiple business stakeholders. For example, they can set up workflows to handle exceptions such as potential signs of fraud, invalid vendor data, invalid file formats and specific PO detail mismatches. Configurable rules like these for invoice validation reduce an agent’s time to manually process an invoice by 80%.

4. Integrate with Your ERP

An AP automation workflow can connect with your existing systems like SAP, Oracle, Pegasus, Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, Infor, Sage or homegrown applications to enable bi-directional data flow. Your ERP can act as the reference for validating extracted invoice data (which otherwise needs to be performed by an AP staff member) and document the workflow information.

5. Gain from Analytics and Data Insights

Over and above AP automation benefits like lower invoice processing costs, automation becomes a true value generator here. First, it uses validation rules to assign a risk assessment score to every invoice. It also prioritizes tasks automatically based on load, productivity or your unique segmentation rules. Next, it uncovers vital data from your invoice processes to highlight productivity trends, KPIs and improvement areas, creating real-time visibility into invoices pending approval.

6. Consider Hosting on the Cloud

Cloud-based workflow automation software significantly lowers your upfront costs and ongoing maintenance overhead, while reducing your overall TCO. On-premises partly managed hosting is also an option in areas where there are critical regulatory requirements.

Save More as You Grow. Make Accounts Payable a Profit Center.

While traditional invoice processing methods become more expensive with scale (as volume and costs are directly related), intelligent automation and STP allow you to reduce costs as you grow. As the solution architecture is inherently scalable, your automation partner can offer volume-based efficiencies — for example, incrementally reduced pricing for volume tiers above 5,000 invoices per month.

JIFFY.ai delivers invoice processing and accounts payable automation benefits for small businesses, large finance and accounting teams and every organization in between. We can help them achieve 80% STP and reduce the human efforts needed to process invoices from a new supplier to 0%. Sophisticated AI and ML-based workflows allow you to look beyond just replicating age-old manual processes in a digital wireframe. Leveraging our intelligent and scalable automation HyperApps, we are committed to helping future-oriented enterprises derive business value across critical functions like accounts payable.

Get the Benefits of Accounts Payable Automation with JIFFY.ai

If you want to iron out bottlenecks or inefficiencies in your business processes through sustainable, intelligent invoice processing automation, please email us at marketing@jiffy.ai. Our HyperApps experts will be happy to help you accelerate!

JIFFY.ai—a company that officially launched less than a year ago—is already a top-scoring disruptor in the Hyper Intelligent Automation (HIA) Breakout Zone, according to global management consulting and strategic advisory firm, Zinnov.

Zinnov regularly performs a comprehensive assessment of Hyper Intelligent Automation platforms as part of Zinnov Zones, an industry-leading annual rating of global technology service providers of cutting-edge technologies. For its 2021 report, Zinnov evaluated over 70 companies, including JIFFY.ai.

Zinnov closely examined JIFFY.ai technology for its technical prowess and scalability across multiple categories, including HIA, Use Case Discovery, Intelligent Document Processing, IT Automation, Intelligent Virtual Agent, F&A Automation, Customer Success Automation, and Talent Management Automation.

JIFFY.ai came out top-ranked in the Breakout Zone because our AI and ML-based platforms bring high-performance automation solutions to companies worldwide.

JIFFY.ai has come far in a short amount of time because we were founded to do things differently. We’re a newcomer in the marketplace, driven to disrupt the terrain of business automation with new ideas.

How HyperApps Leapfrog Other Automation Tech

The JIFFY.ai HyperApp approach leapfrogs past automation solutions such as RPA and SaaS-based point solutions for Business Process Management. (For a detailed rundown on how HyperApps excel in areas where RPA, SaaS-based point solutions, and hyperautomation don’t—read our post, From RPA to Hyperautomation to HyperApps: Level Up Automation Deployments in 2021.)

Zinnov looked at us closely and put JIFFY.ai at the top of its Breakout Zone because our unique approach allows businesses to combine the simplicity of low code with the power of intelligent automation, and the cost convenience of SaaS. Our HyperApps encapsulate all the various capabilities required to achieve successful business process automation—including designing, building, deploying, monitoring, and analyzing.

Our Invoice Processing HyperApp, for example, eliminates the roadblocks to maintaining frictionless cash flow by minimizing the risks and costs associated with inefficient processes. This HyperApp meets the complex technical and business requirements for seamless invoice processing—and then puts it in an easy-to-use, self-service application for business users, with no development team required.

Because our platform makes automation app development easier, we help businesses to avoid a common pitfall: With only technical users and data science professionals involved in automation development and deployment, there is a risk that real business requirements will get overlooked. HyperApps help to demystify the automation of complex business processes, simplifying deployment for business and technical users alike.

Most businesses silo their employees, which allows them to use and develop their specific expertise for the business’s success. This division is especially evident in software and technology areas: One employee may conceive a new idea but must rely on yet another employee to implement it due to a lack of specialized expertise.

While there’s nothing inherently wrong with this breakdown, it can lead to frustration for the idea’s creator. Creators of new ideas must spend a great deal of time and effort translating their thoughts to another group. Some things may get lost in translation, and often, this uphill climb means new concepts don’t come to fruition because the idea is too hard to enact, or too expensive, or too time-consuming.

With JIFFY.ai technology, it’s different: Ideas can be put into development more efficiently. Innovative power is easier to enact. Ideas come to fruition, and innovation moves forward.

When businesses use HyperApps developed on a single platform—rather than stitching together multiple technologies and vendors on their own—they’re able to structure their automation with reusable building blocks. These extensible and scalable building blocks allow them to stay on track through inevitable changes, such as workforce restructuring or application and process changes.

JIFFY.ai is proud to be a leader in the Zinnov Zones Breakout Zone. But we’re just getting started. Society is heading into the Great Reset, and process automation and reliance on digital channels will be a crucial ingredient to our recovery. JIFFY.ai HyperApps technologies will enable predictable wins in the short term, low effort overheads and greater democratization in the mid-term, and radical advantages in the long term. It’s time to disrupt business automation with HyperApps.