Tag: Invoice Processing

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!

In an ideal world, invoice processing would look like this: 

But this is rarely the case. Straight-through-processing or STP of invoices remains out of reach for most businesses, despite advancements in automation over the last decade. Legacy processes, complex workflows, and a chronic lack of agility are commonplace for Account Processing (AP) teams, leading to seven accounts payable challenges: 

1. High manual dependency – Research reveals that 51% of companies use manual efforts for something as simple as data entry. You could be losing out on thousands of dollars in efficiency gains, not to mention added efforts in correcting the 3.6% error rate.

2. Convoluted routes for invoice approval – As 37% of companies still route their invoices manually, unexpected delays prevent timely payments to vendors. In drastic scenarios, the invoice could hit a brick wall and require a fresh billing cycle from scratch. 

3. Mounting liabilities – In the face of delayed approvals and manual errors, invoices could sit unactioned for months. This is a challenge for 27% of companies, leading to accumulated liabilities over time, mounting pressure at EOM/EOQ, and the risk of non-compliance. 

4. Difficulties in handling exceptions – The cause for an exception could range from incorrect price, quantity, or volume, to missing taxation details, PO number, or other information. They derail invoices from a straightforward path, requiring even more manual interventions. 

5. Failure to gain from timebound discounts – A business might negotiate more favorable terms and discounted rates if invoices are processed on time. Unfortunately, nearly 1 in 5 companies cannot realize these benefits due to delayed vendor payments. 

6. Lost invoices and effort duplication – As the saying goes, “too many cooks spoil the broth” – and this is certainly true for AP. In 33% of companies, manual dependencies, ineffective exception handling, approval complexities, and decentralization cause invoices to get lost. 

7. Decentralized AP – With invoices pouring in from multiple business units, and no consistent or cohesive workflow, AP teams’ work can be fragmented. This hinders centralized visibility and governance, which becomes a problem when it is time for the business to scale. 

Automation has long been touted as a silver bullet to these accounts payable challenges, helping companies achieve 100% STP. Research from Ardent Partners suggests that top-performing companies have 2.5 times higher STP rate than their laggard counterparts – clearly, there is a yawning gap to fill. Most companies cite the cost of ownership, a high degree of technical involvement, and a lack of cognitive capabilities as reasons to put off automation. As a result, they fall to the bottom of the pack, lagging far behind industry leaders. 

How HyperApps Can Solve All of Your AP Problems

Instead of a rigid, sweeping automation landscape, a HyperApp offers near-surgical precision when it comes to handling complex processes. A self-contained, ready-to-use, and integration-friendly invoice approval software can transform invoice processing in as little as four weeks. Its architecture is designed from the ground up to give business users the ability to configure a business workflow to their unique needs without any support required from IT.

This can lead to massive effort savings in the long-term, while also making businesses more agile for emerging invoicing needs and handling, or changes to business processes. 

For example, a company with HyperApp-led business process automation software will find it significantly easier to adapt to the touchless needs of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, automatically “learning” new template structures through ML.

Transform Your Invoice Processing With Our Accounts Payable Solution

To learn more about our accounts payable solution and how it answers the most pressing challenges in invoice processing today, download our e-book or request a demo of our HyperApp solution.

Does your enterprise deal with an army of suppliers regularly? Is significant team effort spent on reviewing and sorting a multitude of invoices, but you still end up with late or erroneous payments?

Time to take a look at how JIFFY.ai’s Automated Invoice Processing HyperApp can help you save more by making the right payments at the right time.

The Hassles of Manual Invoice Processing

Any manual process is by its nature more tedious and error-prone than an automated solution. The incremental issues that arise when invoice payments are delayed or inaccurate can lead to severe issues in partner relationships and even break the supply chain.

Manual processing is costly and drawn-out and often fraught with a lot of duplicate and erroneous entries. The enterprise is left dealing with collateral damage in many ways:

• Strain in supplier relationships and a threat to company reputation
• Loss of purchase discounts in the invoice payment process
• Inclusion of late penalties, increasing the costs
• Rework to correct the errors adds to the processing time and costs more to the company
• Erroneous invoices may take weeks to straighten out with the suppliers and hamper the end-of-month closure of accounts

Need Of The Hour – An Intelligent Invoice Processing System implemented through Accounts Payable Automation

According to AQPC’s Open Standards Benchmarking Accounts Payable 2020 survey, on average top-performing companies report that nearly 0.8% of their annual disbursements are duplicate or erroneous. On the other hand, bottom performers report more than twice the amount, at 2% of total annual payments. Just look at this in light of your yearly invoice payment numbers, and it will be staggering enough to take a real relook at the process. 

An automated invoice processing system helps in cultivating positive vendor and supplier relations. It enables users to maintain accurate records and respond to invoices in a timely fashion while ensuring prompt payments and precise records of supplier relationships. 

RPA-Enabled Vs JIFFY.ai’s Intelligent HyperApp Invoice Automation

RPA can quickly automate repetitive tasks in the invoice process and works on a rule-based approach. You can specify rules to flag exceptions when certain conditions are met and raise a request to the human agent to resolve the issue before the payment is approved. An intelligent Accounts Payable automation system applies NLP and Machine Learning (ML) on top of RPA extending RPA’s ability to provide substantial augmentation. 

Our HyperApp Invoice Automation solution builds on RPA’s capabilities to ensure the invoice is accurate before being sent for payment.

• ML examines data captured in different fields and tries to establish a mapping between fields that hold the same pattern of data values
• Robust in handling the cognitive 3-way match between the Purchase Order, report of goods received, and the invoice
• Helps to check if the invoice is accurate, is not a duplicate and the invoice corresponds to the goods requested and received
• Can learn as fast and accurately as experienced humans in identifying and interacting with suppliers, automatically performing input intake, coding, processing and routing invoice workflows, denoting payment deadlines, approval workflows and approvers. It requires human interaction only at critical checkpoints.
• Makes it easy for supplier business users to interact directly with the invoice process through easy to use interfaces
• Provides the analytic ability to detect payment schedules well in advance, to reduce errors, and to save costs by incorporating purchase discounts in the invoice process
• Improves cash flow transparency with the validation engine confirming the accuracy of invoices before pushing them into the ERP system and reducing the need for downstream updates

Invoice Right on Time with JIFFY.ai’s HyperApp

JIFFY.ai’s HyperApp’s unique features for accurate invoice processing are:

• Intelligent Invoice Extraction – with built-in cognitive capabilities to handle complex invoices like line items, tables, etc. and the cognitive capability can automatically create templates for new invoices
• Customizable Supplier Portal – exercises full control over portal customizations to ease supplier onboarding and ongoing invoice management
• Configurable Workflows – allows faster implementation cycles, additions of new suppliers or new product lines, configurable for a multitude of suppliers and invoice types
• Powerful Validation Engine – ensures all validation is handled ahead of ERP to avoid downstream updates in the ERP system
• Powerful Data Analytics – the underlying data layer allows us to provide analytics around the process itself and also around business intelligence
• Pluggable ERP connectors – can plug directly into your existing infrastructure

Impactful ‘App’lications

Many organizations have reported reduced errors and improved overall process efficiency after implementing the JIFFY.ai HyperApp solution for their invoice process. 

Statistics:

Error reduction – 90%+
Efficiency Improvement – 85%+

Intelligent Accounts Payable automation of the complex invoice process with a more collaborative and connected approach and smarter, dynamic data-driven decision-making ability is required in today’s hyper-competitive, fast-paced business landscape. The JIFFY.ai HyperApp solution is the right choice for you to transform your invoice process, increase your revenue and maintain trust with your suppliers.

Drop an email to marketing@jiffy.ai and our HyperApps experts can help you accelerate invoice processing, straight through!

Is your business treating invoice processing as an unavoidable cost of doing business (pun intended!)? You don’t have to when you use accounting process automation!

When seemingly mundane activities are not optimized using intelligent invoice processing automation, you could be leaking significant dollars without even realizing it. Interestingly, it is such tasks that can be transformed to be not only effortless but also provide deep insights into your fund management.

Any opportunity to improve business processes and create bandwidth for other critical activities – especially during the current economic conditions – is valuable and worth pursuing. Manual effort spent on repetitive administrative tasks like managing invoices results in a significant waste of time, effort and money. Studies show that Accounts Payable automation software can reduce invoice processing costs by 90 percent. ¹

It is common for large enterprises to interact with thousands of vendors and pay thousands of invoices per year. Most organizations still require a great deal of manual intervention to manage various aspects of invoice processing even after implementing RPA to automate the process.

How Do Businesses Currently Capture Invoice Data?

Large enterprises receive thousands of invoices every month from numerous vendors, each in a different format. Many suppliers still present their invoices via paper or as a PDF attachment in an email. These delivery methods require a great deal of manual processing, including scanning, data verification, and exception management. The goal of every organization is to get to a point where their Accounts Payable teams can perform end-to-end touchless invoice processing.

An invoice goes through several stages of scrutiny before it gets paid by the account payables department. The dedicated teams that handle invoice processing manually feed the data into enterprise workflow tools like SAP and similar ERP applications to ease the orchestration of invoice processing, including routing the data for multiple scrutiny checks, approval and validation for payment.

Potential Invoice Processing Concerns in Today’s Scenario

A majority of the invoices today are electronically processed where a vendor uploads the invoice on a supplier portal of the organization. Internal systems like SAP have integrated automated invoice processing solutions to manage the invoice data electronically. However, many vendors don’t adhere to the submission process through a supplier portal and end up sending the invoices directly via email. Even invoices submitted electronically are not standard and the same vendor may regularly change formats and fields.

Larger enterprises have teams to manually sort all the invoices, create the invoices in the system, validate the details across the ERP and GRN (Goods Receipt Number) systems and transfer the entries into the SAP system for further processing and approval.

The to-and-fro communication between the business and the finance team for validation and the overhead efforts to perform a match between a number of invoices and associated business units included in the delivery of goods makes it difficult in many cases to validate a one-one match between the purchase order to a goods receipt.

For delivery of services, there is no concept of a GRN. In such cases, the invoice process goes through additional approval. It requires human intervention to route the invoices for the required approval, which further increases manual input.

Manual processing can result in high processing costs, increased risk, process and accounting errors, duplicate and late payments. According to AQPCs 2018 survey² of 1,480 organizations reporting data on the cost to process an invoice, the bottom 25% are spending $10 or more per invoice processed. The median cost to process an invoice was $5.83.

The Challenges of using RPA for Invoice Processing in Accounts Payable Automation

• With the advent of RPA, automation of invoice processing was done based on fixed invoice templates or rules. With the number of vendors increasing, it was difficult to train the automation tasks to handle frequent changes in invoice templates.
• As organizations added new vendors and invoice formats, the RPA system failed to handle the process due to a lack of cognitive ability or flexibility to understand different formats, and an inability to adapt to new features.
• RPA solutions were also weak in ensuring the accuracy of data validation owing to the inability to perform 3-way match in the invoice validation and business rule enforcement throughout the invoice process.
• RPA solutions were not able to handle exception cues or provide many analytic insights of invoice status, improving cashflow or reducing processing costs.

Every touch to an invoice increases costs associated with processing the invoice and accuracy in handling and payments.

Accounting Process Automation for Touchless Invoice Processing

Our Automated Invoice Processing HyperApp with integrated Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning capabilities can exercise full control over Supplier Portal customizations to ease supplier onboarding and invoice management. It has the built-in cognitive ability to handle complex invoice formats and create templates for new invoices.

Equipped with a powerful validation engine, the validation process is dealt with ahead of ERP processes to avoid downstream updates in the ERP system minimizing errors. The accounting process automation platform allows faster implementation of configurable workflows for new suppliers, product lines or invoices. The potential to provide powerful data analytic features gives the competitive edge for Accounts Payable automation.

JIFFY.ai’s Automated Invoice Processing HyperApp is truly touchless in every sense. Our customers reported significant improvement in straight-through invoice processing, 90% improvement in invoice processing turnaround times and more than 85% efficiency improvement after implementation.

Accelerate your automation journey with JIFFY.ai’s low-code platform.

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References

¹https://www.industryweek.com/finance/article/22010161/the-cost-of-paperbased-invoicing

²https://www.apqc.org/system/files/K07216_Cost%20to%20process%20accounts%20payable%20updated%202_26_18.pdf

Whether you’ve already implemented accounts payable automation technology in your enterprise or you’ve not yet implemented a solution, it’s important to understand exactly what you’re buying – and what you’re NOT buying – when you choose a vendor. 

There are quite a few automated invoice processing solutions in the market that with varying levels of automation sophistication can facilitate the elimination of human errors, increase efficiency, and reduce costs. Choosing the right vendor is critical to your company’s ability to manage cash flow and properly process invoices and payments.

But when choosing an automated invoice processing software, the question is not whether these vendors can do what they claim. The real questions to ask are: How much does the comprehensive solution for AP automation cost and, once you sign on, are all the necessary elements bundled in a single, transparent price tag? Will the solution be flexible and efficient in the long run? And will it require many external resources to manage it well into the future?

“Real” Total Invoicing Processing Costs for Accounts Payable Automation

We’ve put together some guidelines that can help you to select the right innovative automation solution while delivering a low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Here are some things to consider before selecting an accounts payable automation technology solution for invoice processing:

• Does the solution provide a unified platform that supports your end-to-end invoicing process at every step?
• Can the solution be easily implemented and adapt to your existing technology infrastructure?
• Is the solution scalable with built-in functionality for expansion of your invoice management process?
• Does the solution provide analytics on real-time data to help you see the current status of your cash flow and invoices, as well as provide visibility into improvements that can be made to the process itself?
• When your business processes change in response to market demand, will you need an army of consultants or additional resources to implement and manage the changes to the automation solution?
• Does the solution have built-in cognitive capabilities to handle complex invoices as well as automatically create templates for new invoices?

Invoice processing costs can also be hidden. For instance, some solutions will still require an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine for the conversion of images to text. Transparency around these additional costs is crucial and, typically, such additional requirements aren’t identified until you’re in the middle of implementation.

JIFFY.ai’s Automated Invoice Processing Software HyperApp for Reduced TCO

The JIFFY.ai Automated Invoice Processing HyperApp combines the power of Artificial Intelligence with the efficiency of RPA to give you an all-in-one, ready-to-install automated invoice processing software Accounts Payable automation solution. We help your organization to maintain high-quality invoice data with improved processing times, zero errors and absolutely no hidden costs.

Here’s what our HyperApp offers:

• Supports Cloud-based Saas or on-premise/private cloud solutions
• Pricing based on volume of invoices processed per year – not a licensing fee
• Zero additional or hidden technology/implementation costs
• Best-in-class guarantee of cost for invoices processed
• Scalable solution for the long run
• Easy to configure workflows for adding new suppliers, processing rules, or adjusting the process overall
• Integrated cognitive workflow with Machine Learning, making automated cognitive decision-making a reality 

Our customers have reported reduced invoice processing costs, errors, and time spent on the invoicing process. Higher levels of automation with the cognitive learning ability in JIFFY.ai’s HyperApp has helped reduce transaction and implementation costs, as well as TCO.

Bring Home Lower TCO with JIFFY.ai’s Automated Invoice Processing Software

Automated invoice processing software solutions are available to help companies optimize and expedite the invoicing process. However, hidden costs in implementation can derail the savings and improvements quickly.

Therefore, it is essential to have clarity regarding optimizing the “real” TCO of the Accounts Payable automation solution. It should be one that doesn’t have any hidden costs and pricing based on the number of invoices processed per year, not on the number of procured licenses. JIFFY.ai’s Invoice Processing HyperApp can optimize your invoicing process with advanced intelligence and lowered TCO for your organization. Contact us to request your demo today.

There are now increasingly mixed feelings about business process automation, and rightly so. While initially benefits lived up to the early hype (implementations achieve 30% to 200% ROI in the short term, reports McKinsey), mature projects are more disillusioned and typically run into a slew of challenges, particularly scaling. As automation comes of age, traditional approaches like robotic process automation (RPA) or point solutions software for Business Process Management run into roadblocks around scalability, adaptability, and ease of use. The number of companies scaling RPA is growing at snail’s pace, found Deloitte, with just 4% of companies successfully moving into implementations involving 50+ bots ¹. According to another report by IDG and Appian, automation was only “somewhat effective” (at best) for 65% of business users.²

As your company gears up for a speedy recovery post-COVID-19 – taking advantage of a bullish market – can you afford to be held back by stumbling automation projects?

What is RPA?

Robotic process automation (RPA) uses technology governed by business logic and structured inputs to perform high-volume repetitive tasks in enterprise productivity applications. Using RPA tools, you can configure software, or a “bot” (robot), to process a transaction, manipulate data, trigger responses and communicate with other digital systems. By combining APIs and user interface (UI) interactions, RPA bots can emulate human processes and complete autonomous execution of various business activities.

How to Move Beyond RPA Technology: Is Hyper Automation the Answer?

Over the last few years, RPA has emerged as almost an industry default for automation.

Nearly 1 in 3 companies use RPA technology despite its numerous shortfalls. Robotic process automation is mostly inflexible, with additional configurations needed for any change or extension to the system. You have to put in a lot of development effort, and even when using low-code platforms, there is significant effort duplication.

For example, if the RPA-automated invoice processing in your organization runs into an exception, it has to be manually configured into the script or might even require individual processing into your ERP.

As an enhancement to this, enterprises can choose hyper automation that uses intelligent, cognitive technologies like AI-based process mining, machine learning algorithms, optical character recognition, etc., to make automations more intuitive and efficient. Gartner named hyper automation among the top ten strategic technology trends for last year, anticipating its widespread potential.

But hyper automation is far from reaching maturity. Unless you are a massive organization with a dedicated RPA budget to throw at promising experiments, hyper automation remains out of reach, barring a few one-off projects.

A much more common approach to automating business processes is through SaaS-based point solutions software.

Point solutions introduces a significant degree of automation without most business leaders even realizing it – for instance, a simple scheduling feature on email, automated “nudges” for communication follow-ups, or a copywriting tool automatically checking documents against a style guide. In the wake of COVID-19, point solutions have exploded in popularity as employees/individual business units choose their favorite automation aids without always facing IT intervention.

But, for the organization, this means mounting shadow IT, the risk of fragmentation, and growing dependency on external providers to support dynamic business processes.

What Point Solutions Software Get Right (and What They Do Not)

There is an argument to be made for SaaS-based point solutions software. They are turnkey, easy to use, and – on the surface – involve minimal investments. It was only a matter of time before the “app-ification” of digital activity in the consumer world percolated into business processes, helped by a massive boom in B2B SaaS solutions.

However, the biggest USP of point solutions is their ready-to-use nature, which inherently makes them inflexible. As they target the widest possible user segment (without cognizance of the specific business use case), it is impossible to configure their automation capabilities as per your precise requirements. Or, if deeper configurations are available, you need an in-house expert with knowledge of that point solution.

As your business – and process map – evolves, you will find yourself reaching out to SaaS providers repeatedly to introduce the necessary features. In the long-term, this is an unsustainable model.

How HyperApps Help to Automate Enterprise Business Processes End-to-end

In addition to the three commonly discussed options (RPA, hyper automation, and point solutions), companies can also consider the HyperApp approach when automating business processes. JIFFY.ai’s HyperApps can combine the simplicity of low code with the power of intelligent automation and the cost convenience of SaaS to provide a comprehensive solution that truly empowers your business users.

Here’s a simple example from probably one of the most critical areas of your business, accounts payable processing in enterprise accounting: Let’s suppose as part of a new regulatory requirement, your accounts payable team must report all invoices in a specific currency and upload them into an e-invoicing portal. In the point solution scenario, your team will have to rely on the SaaS vendor to enable this change, who will charge an extra fee for that feature. However, with a HyperApp framework, your invoice processing group can configure that change themselves on the automation platform and make it available not just for the enterprise accounting function, but roll it out across the organization.

Unlike point solutions used for accounts payable automation, you can scale HyperApps to process any volume of invoices (as per our example – it is applicable to virtually any business process) and integrate with new/existing workflows.

Further, HyperApps bring in the flexibility you need in a dynamic business environment. Adapting your enterprise automation solutions to new business process requirements is made simple with a point-and-click interface, while integrations are available natively for use by business stakeholders, with little or no intervention from IT.

This could be a game-changer for companies as they enter a new era of digital transformation through end-to-end enterprise automation post-COVID-19.

Road to Recovery: HyperApps Can be the Pivot for Meaningful Digital Transformation

As companies gear up for what could be the world’s steepest recovery period to date, digitalization could either cripple growth or push it to new heights.

It is estimated that business process automation and an even greater reliance on digital channels will be vital in the emerging future. For example, the number of public sector organizations citing automation as their top 3 priority grew from 23% pre-COVID to 35% in the post-COVID period. HyperApps enable predictable wins in the short term, low effort overheads and greater democratization in the mid-term, and radical advantages in the long term – addressing the challenges of using point solutions for automating business processes.

There’s something to be said for doing the right thing in the right way. The benefits of process automation beyond robotic process automation or point solutions software are undeniable, especially in our new contactless and low-touch world. HyperApps help companies strike the right balance, enabling them to achieve immediate growth targets and paving the way for more opportunities in the future.

Accelerate your automation journey with JIFFY.ai’s low-code platform.

Achieve end-to-end business process automation. Accurately. Easily. Quickly.
Email us at marketing@jiffy.ai

References

¹https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/bg/Documents/technology-media-telecommunications/Deloitte-us-cons-global-rpa-survey.pdf

²https://assets.appian.com/uploads/2020/05/Business-Automation-Technologies-and-the-Customer-Experience_May-2020.pdf

In the early days of automation, robotic process automation or RPA brought the promise of radical transformation and improvement. Organizations could automate mundane, repetitive tasks, potentially giving back thousands of work hours to the business and reducing FTE efforts. Hyper automation will eventually transform traditional automation capabilities into impactful automated processes.

The original types of automations were not integrated or even necessarily connected to automate end-to-end tasks or processes – leading to fragmentation. A decentralized approach and focus on “a bot per user” have increased technical debt for enterprises, putting true digital transformation out of reach.

Over time, enterprises cobbled together disparate automation technologies to protect their original investments in RPA and were forced to assume the risks involved in integrating them.

What is Hyper Automation?

Gartner coined the term “hyper automation” to define this integration of technologies, encompassing RPA, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and these technologies’ growing sophistication. Despite RPA’s massive market share, it was fast becoming apparent that RPA alone could not keep pace with today’s digital transformation requirements, necessitating hyper automation – but this had its own share of issues.

Organizations choosing to automate via RPA as well as those venturing into hyper automation report a significant trade-off in terms of growing complexity, mounting technical debt, and a snowballing total cost of ownership (TCO) – which does not make sense in the long-term.

As we enter a new era in digital transformation, it is time to revisit our automation approaches and level up.

Traditional RPA is more of a white elephant for enterprise automation.

RPA vs Hyper Automation

During COVID-19, we saw several years’ worth of digital transformation (3-7 years, according to McKinsey) take place in a matter of months. As we enter the next phase marked by consolidation, maturity, and long-term sustainability, organizations should rethink one of the core tenets of digital transformation – automating business processes.

Robotic process automation (RPA) is entirely task-based, where you define precise rules to guide workflows in business process automation. Let’s say you are setting up an RPA software for invoice automation. At the invoice registration step, you can configure RPA to read from a file/folder, but every new source has to be manually configured. As you receive invoice submissions from multiple sources like cloud-drives, email, etc., the RPA script has to be updated and managed accordingly.

Over time, this leads to RPA becoming more of a white elephant than a genuine value generator, as you will be spending outsized efforts on updating, cleaning, and maintaining your automation scripts as your enterprise grows into diverse functions/areas.

A survey found that over 4 in 10 enterprises are having to spend more time and resources to maintain RPA than originally expected.

Another issue is deployment timelines. Enterprise leaders start with the best of intentions but adapting RPA to a typical enterprise’s scale, and process complexity takes time – often up to three years. More than two-thirds of deployments take anywhere between 1 and 3 years, delaying your time-to-value. And once RPA is in place, just 4% are able to scale, mainly due to the complexity of projects (57%).

This leaves you with mounting technical debt and sunk costs, further increasing your TCO.

The Hyper Automation Journey

Improving on this approach, Gartner introduced hyper automation as the next phase of maturity, which would take advantage of AI/ML to cut down some of the inefficiencies of traditional RPA.

The rise of hyper automation, the no. 1 strategic technology trend from 2020

Gartner calls hyper automation “the application of advanced technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), to increasingly automate processes and augment humans,” with the ultimate goal of enabling AI-driven decision making.

It was the no.1 technology trend from 2020, poised to simplify several of the complex scenarios that would stymie traditional RPA.

Here’s a simple AP automation example: If you are using automation to extract invoices, RPA would require you to pre-train the engine and create separate templates for each supplier. Hyper automation improves this through ML so that the data extraction isn’t template dependent. Similarly, when it comes to validating invoices, hyper intelligent automation can crosscheck via intelligent OCR, in contrast to RPA, which only reads specific ERP fields or structured information.

But even hyper automation does not match up to the promise of true digital transformation. Breaking down the above scenario, you will find frequent human involvement (often at preventable intervention points). For example, hyper automation-based invoice extraction still lacks continuous learning capabilities. ML models are mostly a “black box” that cannot be adapted to business user behavior. For invoice validation, you still have to write complex scripts – only now, it is compatible with both structured and unstructured information.

For this reason, hyper automation remains confined to the “promising trend” segment, with limited real-world usability. Research names only Amazon and Google as key players, owing to their rich AI/ML capabilities.

Does this mean enterprises who need immediate and effective outcomes from automation are left in the lurch unless they are willing to spend on a 5-year-long ROI generation roadmap?

This is where HyperApps come in.

Progressing to HyperApps – a pragmatic model with human-in-the-loop

HyperApps combine the functional principles of RPA, the intelligence/cognitive capabilities of hyper automation, and the self-service convenience of SaaS apps to enable automations that show value in months and last for decades. 

Continuing with the scenario of invoice automation, here is how a HyperApp would do it: 

• Invoice registration – Business users can integrate their preferred invoice source through a simple, point-and-click UI.
• Invoice extraction – Any exception not covered by existing formats is routed to the business user. The user’s behavior is taken as a learning point, and the ML will adapt its future actions accordingly. 
• Invoice validation – All validation rules are pre-configured; business users can toggle a rule on/off for a specific supplier when validating. 
• True cloud native – Pushing new configurations to existing automation implementations is easy, allowing for constant upgrades of the HyperApp’s business process automation capability. 

HyperApps introduce a few important changes to the RPA-to-hyperautomation maturity curve. 

First, HyperApps rely on self-service, empowering business users to set up automated workflows and configurable business rules. What the HyperApp eliminates is the dependency on technical resources to make business configuration enhancements and changes. HyperApp designers can also add new functionality to the app and business users can turn them on based on their needs.

Second, HyperApps are modular, with their components reusable as you grow, by applying the same components to multiple scenarios. This brings down the total cost of ownership and generates cost savings, while also shrinking time to value because of its turnkey nature.

Finally, the human-in-the-loop user interface can replace the bulk training ML approach in cases where it is not possible to create a pre-trained ML model. This business user-led approach allows enterprises to build or enhance ML capabilities with their own business data.

As you can see, HyperApps address the key impediments to traditional RPA and hyper automation. They ensure fast deployment and low maintenance, adapting to complex processes during business growth. They also keep a human in the loop to power continuous learning, reducing your efforts for manually configuring AI/ML models. Importantly, HyperApps are already in action at several enterprises, enabling long-term digital transformation without having to wait for technology or infrastructure maturity.

Learn from the frontlines and level up today with Hyper Automation

Demonstrating a remarkable improvement over RPA alone, one of the world’s largest automobile manufacturers was able to achieve 85% straight-through processing (STP) for invoicing processes in just a 12-week period. The company first tried RPA in their AP automation journey to replace manual execution. But it was too rigid and rules-based, unable to handle frequent changes in invoice templates as the manufacturer added new vendors, new invoice formats, new types of suppliers, etc., as part of its growth journey.

RPA solutions couldn’t keep pace with the company’s 5000-strong supplier network, processing 150,000 invoices per month.

An Invoice Processing HyperApp successfully addressed this by learning from 12 months’ worth of historical invoices and continually updating itself whenever it encountered an exception. Using a HyperApp, the manufacturer can process one invoice in three minutes vs. the pre-automation 24-hour turnaround. And unlike most implementations, it saw measurable ROI in six months.

At JIFFY.ai, we help organizations around the world with their digital transformation roadmaps by making it possible to level up their automation projects. This pragmatic progress from RPA to hyper automation and finally, to HyperApps has proven to bring about battle-tested outcomes.

Accelerate your automation journey with JIFFY.ai’s low-code platform.

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Achieve end-to-end business process automation. Accurately. Easily. Quickly.
Email us at marketing@jiffy.ai