Month: March 2021

Mention office automation systems, and people immediately think of eliminating paperwork. While that is one result of implementing office automation software, it’s far from the only benefit. Read on to learn about the different types of office automation systems and how automating office tasks can boost efficiency.

Types of Office Automation Systems

Office automation can be achieved through various systems, most of which offer a less-than-perfect solution. Here are three types of office automation systems.

OCR

Optical character recognition, better known as OCR, can recognize text in scanned documents and images and provide that information in an accessible electronic format. A significant drawback with OCR as an office automation system is that it introduces numerous errors as it scrapes documents for information. Staff then need to take hours or even days to track down the details and correct the errors.

RPA

Robotic process automation (RPA) utilizes technology managed by business logic and structured inputs. The rules that govern RPA bots are so inflexible that any change to the data transposition, user interface or APIs can require additional configurations, which cost time and money.

AI/ML

When used for office automation, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) employ flexible rules to identify and gather the necessary information and complete the appropriate business processes. cfo.jiffy.ai/'s Automate is an example of an office automation solution that puts AI and ML to good use, giving companies the agility to create the software they need quickly and easily.

The Role of Office Automation Systems

When properly implemented, office automation systems are powerful tools that can manage a wide range of functions, including:

• Data management
• Accounting
• Inventory management
• Facility management
• Training
• Other administrative tasks

In assuming these functions, back-office automation software can deliver significant improvements, such as:

• Eliminating manual processes
• Identifying inefficient workflows
• Facilitating informed decision making

The Benefits of Office Automation Systems

Regardless of its function, office automation system software helps reduce the costs associated with the tasks it performs. Office automation products also provide other essential benefits, including:

• Better accuracy
• Improved data storage and management
• Better business processes
• Streamlined information sharing

All of these benefits help improve efficiency in a direct, impactful way.

An Office Automation System Example

cfo.jiffy.ai/'s Invoice Processing HyperApp is an excellent example of an office automation system that boosts efficiency using AI and ML.

Using HyperApps, you can create office automation solutions that achieve straight-through processing (STP) of invoices. STP means that an invoice is received, approved and paid without manual intervention. That can lead to considerable efficiencies compared to traditional manual processing methods, which can take up to two business weeks to clear one invoice.

Our Invoice Processing HyperApp provides automated workflows that connect effortlessly with ERP and other third-party business systems. It also offers pre-configured business rules to manage aberrations like invoice volume fluctuations and supplier requests for part or early payments.

Develop Office Automation Systems With cfo.jiffy.ai/

You can use office automation systems developed with cfo.jiffy.ai/ HyperApps to cut costs, improve workflows and boost efficiency. Contact us today to speak with HyperApps experts who are ready to help you get the most out of your office automation software.

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 cfo.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 cfo.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 cfo.jiffy.ai/’s HyperApp

cfo.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 cfo.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 cfo.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.

cfo.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 cfo.jiffy.ai/'s low-code platform.

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Achieve end-to-end business process automation. Accurately. Easily. Quickly.
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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.

cfo.jiffy.ai/’s Automated Invoice Processing Software HyperApp for Reduced TCO

The cfo.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 cfo.jiffy.ai/’s HyperApp has helped reduce transaction and implementation costs, as well as TCO.

Bring Home Lower TCO with cfo.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. cfo.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.