As a highly customer-oriented industry, banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) has always been a prime candidate for digital transformation. COVID-19 catalyzed the adoption of digital technologies in this otherwise conservative sector, says Deloitte in their 2021 banking and capital markets outlook. Moving away from in-person interactions created challenges, forward-thinking financial services firms viewed those challenges as opportunities to create better experiences through automation.
To fully realize the digital promise, BFSI firms can use a variety of levers to elevate process efficiency and customer engagement. These can include creating an optimal mix of digital and human interactions, using data intelligently to better shape experiences, and incorporating artificial intelligence (AI)-based solutions to automate processes and free up capacity to focus on strategic activities.
Intelligent automation aided by AI and cognitive technologies can help to accelerate processing time and reduce the number of errors in complex processes end-to-end, removing the sector’s reliance on legacy methods like spreadsheets to get jobs done. This is a massive opportunity! According to McKinsey, AI could deliver up to $1 trillion in additional value for the banking sector.
Where to start using intelligent automation?
Even with all the digital transformation it underwent, the BFSI industry is poised to take further advantage of the technologies that can expand its field of vision and open even more opportunities, including intelligent automation.
Though the first wave of automation improved some financial service providers’ basic functions by employing robotic process automation (RPA) for repetitive tasks, there are many organizations that are still in need of far more sophisticated and intelligent applications of automation for their evolving business processes. Firms that are already scaling their intelligent automation efforts are leading with improved experiences across the value chain while reducing their operating expenses and driving better margins through significant process evolution.
These automations have proved to perform iterative tasks at scale. They ingest data from third-party sources, populate digital platforms, trigger notifications and initiate actions without human intervention, so the firms can virtually operate 24/7 without overburdening employees.
Forward-thinking firms continue to streamline their automation-readiness. These organizations are seeing the benefits of intelligent automation unlocked across multiple operating areas through use cases that have a significant, positive ROI. For instance, we recently helped automate redemption request processing for a US-based financial services leader, transferring metadata between the front-end and back-end systems, eliminating staff involvement altogether. Our customer continues to see recurring expense reduction, saving thousands of person-hours of resource expenditure with this engagement.
Based on our experience and expertise working in this industry, we have shortlisted a few similar business use cases where intelligent automation has been creating fast and incisive impact.
1. Letting customers open accounts remotely
AI is an integral component of intelligent automation and sets it apart from stand-alone, traditional RPA. Using AI, you can leverage technologies like Optical Character Reading (OCR) and cutting-edge facial recognition, blended with an integrated intelligent automation platform, to help fully automate and accelerate the account opening process. Customers need only to initiate a video call, and the facial recognition solution evaluates features to verify identity. Post the verification, the intelligent automation solution can then take over to extract the necessary details from remotely shared data to populate the fields in your enterprise resource planning (ERP) or core system.
2. Saving effort, costs, and time in data migration
Any digital transformation activity, where you are modernizing applications that have existed for decades, involves complex data migration. Lenders, credit assessment firms, insurance companies, and similar service providers rely on data as a key asset. Traditional migration of data would involve at least six stakeholders (a business user, a data custodian, a systems specialist, a database specialist, a product specialist, and an extract, transform, and load specialist). An intelligent automation solution that reads the legacy source, applies transformation/reformatting procedures, and loads the data into the new schema can significantly cut down the human effort, operational costs and turnaround time involved in this process.
3. Making credit risk assessment more accurate and scalable
The analytics technology needed to accurately screen prospective borrowers and assign risk scores already exists. However, human employees still need to go through this data, which can be cumbersome and prone to errors, especially when it comes to processing small-to-micro retail loans. An intelligent automation solution can connect with the analytics engine on one end, and the underwriting system on the other, to automatically process risk assessments and loan applications below a certain threshold.
4. Detecting fraud and setting up timely alerts
By mapping and continuously monitoring real-time transactions against data from ERP, business intelligence, and third-party providers, your anti-money laundering (AML) and fraud detection teams can detect suspicious behavior and signs of misappropriation. An intelligent automation solution can not only help them by keeping a constant watch for these tell-tale signals (purchase order mismatch, split transactions, payments made at unusual hours) but also alert the necessary parties in real time. Leveraging this, you can set up an automated workflow for low-value transactions, where suspicious behavior can be approved or blocked automatically.
5. Processing and validating applications while maintaining data integrity
Manual application validation processes – whether for banks, insurance, or asset management firms – are painfully error-prone and tedious. When done using spreadsheets (which is still a staple for the BFSI industry), there are the added risks of data inconsistency, inability to track lineage across multiple systems, and duplication. An intelligent automation solution, on the other hand, can extract and store data involved in all these processes, so it can be easily accessed, tracked, and used. Leveraging technologies such as OCR, Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), Machine Learning (ML), and Natural Language Processing (NLP) in the solution, your business users can process complex applications from large commercial entities within no time, and customize the solution to suit emerging process changes as and when needed, without depending on the IT team.
But does that mean you have to disrupt your existing IT landscape to build an intelligent automation system afresh? The best part is, it can be integrated /added into / onto your IT infrastructure seamlessly adding more value to it, and enabling bidirectional data flow with ERP, content management systems, regulatory databases, and custodian data portals.
These five use cases are just the tip of the iceberg. The potential use cases for intelligent automation in financial services are vast, including business-critical processes such as KYC/Re-KYC, card activation, audit processes, customer engagement, and reconciliation in wealth management.
Discover more ways that intelligent automation can enable you to unlock these hidden opportunities in our eBook How Intelligent Automation is Propelling Banking & Financial Services: Top Ten Use Cases Reimagined. The eBook also explains how cfo.jiffy.ai/’s integrated platform-based approach can help realize exponential returns from your automation investment.
Written by Babu Sivadasan, Chairman & CEO | Updated on February 18, 2023
With COVID-19 causing risks to human health and disruption to our way of life in general, especially the way we work, companies have been forced to pursue alternate ways of making progress. Many of them are striving to use intelligent automation and AI to innovate their way forward while working safely from home.
This shift does not mean that we do not value human work, or the role people play in the enterprise. Think about the agricultural revolution. In the 18th century, people transitioned from hard laboring stationary farming to original inventions that altered the farming process. The new patterns of crop rotation and livestock utilization paved the way for better crop yields and the ability to support more animals. It was an opportunity to produce more, not a judgment of the reduced value of human work.
These agricultural changes impacted societies as there was a decline in both the intensity of the work and the number of farming laborers needed. Nevertheless, the positive effects of this disruption gave life to new technologies and opportunities as people migrated to the city to work in industrial jobs. As humans, it’s in our nature to innovate and create new solutions that become paramount to organizations and the people that work within them. We believe that as intelligent automation, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning continue to evolve, we have an opportunity to harness this energy of innovation in a whole new way.
Our mission is to enable organizations to cross the human machine divide that has existed since the introduction of machines and enable them to co-exist seamlessly. We aim to reduce the friction between the two in a natural, human-friendly way. Eliminating the need for expensive translation mechanisms in the form of data entry, data synchronization and mundane activities allows organizations to become extremely efficient and resilient. Enabling innovation within the enterprise using natural language instructions, we bring out the innovator in the everyday business user. By letting the machines understand human language to achieve automation we drive speed in business transformation previously not possible. This is the core of our perspective on automation.
For too long, enterprises have placed contradictory expectations on their most talented thought leaders and employees. We have expected people to be innovative while also weighing them down with administrative tasks. Research shows “task switching” disrupts flow of thought and creativity. Ultimately, we launched cfo.jiffy.ai/ to reduce this phenomenon and to allow creativity to flourish and innovation to be unleashed in its most uninterrupted form. Our relentless commitment is to see a change in how organizations redesign their work, supporting them through the power that automation and AI offers to maximize strength, resiliency and scale.
Historically, automation was seen as a point solution for mundane actions. You gave it a specific function or set of functions, and it performed. Now, technology allows us to elevate and redefine the process and achieve progress through automation. This change is necessary in the ever-evolving landscape in which we live.
Unlock the potential of AI-powered transformation. Talk to one of our experts today.
How can you guide your organization through digital transformation when approximately 80% of business data still exists in unstructured forms such as emails, images, and PDFs?
Yes, you need a tool to quickly digitize all these documents with minimal manual effort. Intelligent document processing enables this and helps you automate document-related business processes at scale. Here’s how.
Intelligent document processing (IDP) is defined as a set of tools powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Optical Character Reading (OCR) and other technologies that can convert unstructured, semi-structured, and structured documents into machine-readable data, which is the foundation of business process automation.
Industries and enterprise functions that rely heavily on documents, such as banks, schools, healthcare institutions, HR and Finance & Accounting can save tremendous amounts of time, effort, and investment using IDP.
IDP’s key benefits include:
Thousands of work hours saved per employee per year
Reduced error rates
Reduced operational and human resources costs
Faster document processing at scale
Standardization of processes over time
Happier employees, as they focus more on value-generating tasks
For instance, one of our clients, a leading automobile manufacturer, was able to achieve 85% straight through processing over a 12-week period across a volume of 150,000 invoices per month for 5,000 suppliers using our invoice processing HyperApp. The HyperApp that has built-in intelligent document processing capabilities helped their AP team to cut the time needed to process one invoice from 24 hours to just 3 minutes. The solution helped automate 90% of their invoice processing.
IDP can drive these outsized benefits due to its key advantages over traditional document processing automation solutions.
Intelligent Document Processing vs. Automated Document Processing
IDP improves upon pure ML-based document processing solutions in four ways.
The ML component predicts the data from most of the fields, but some extractions still have to be done manually. (Eg: Data from tables inside tables)
IDP learns all the data extraction rules based on human inputs, and then makes automatic corrections over time.
OCR accuracy
OCR accuracy is low, as the system can convert domain-specific labels like “street”, but falters on dynamic values.
IDP uses both standard OCR and visual attention-based OCR to recognize all values in a document and extract data accurately.
Tech involvement
Data science team might have to pitch in to train the ML model for new document formats.
IDP typically has a GUI that allows business users to set up new document formats, templates, and workflows. No IT involvement.
Adaptive nature
A new ML model resets all earlier formats.
IDP framework ensures that each new model only improves the document extraction accuracy.
What is Document Processing Software? IDP Software Explained, with an Example
An IDP software is an application that packages all the capabilities mentioned above (low-touch, GUI-based, AI-powered, and adaptive), into a single, business-user-friendly platform. For example, cfo.jiffy.ai/ offers a hybrid IDP software that can handle heterogeneous documents and data formats using both ML and rules-based processing, along with sophisticated OCR. Using our intelligent document processing software, you can:
Process a variety of documents, involving complex tables, tables with/without lines, multi-page documents, etc.
Extract data from various ID card formats, receipts, driver’s licenses, and other similar documents
Automatically extract and feed data to the destination applications, such as CRM, ERP, etc.
Easily define and train new ML models for unfamiliar document formats
Handle exceptions and automate document processing-related activities at scale, even when there are thousands of types of documents involved
The cfo.jiffy.ai/ Approach to Document Processing: Efficient and Future-Ready
As companies continue to embrace and progress digital transformation rapidly, the efficiency gains offered by IDP will make it an enterprise staple and elevate employee experiences by eliminating tedious repetitive work.
cfo.jiffy.ai/ adopts a hybrid approach to IDP so you can gain from AI’s predictive capabilities while learning from human inputs when exceptions arise. This places our document processing software ahead of most industry peers in terms of accuracy, scope, and user support. For example, cfo.jiffy.ai/ extracts text inside complex tables with 15-20% more accuracy compared to competitors.
With true touchless processing and usage-based SaaS pricing (you pay only for the volume of documents processed), cfo.jiffy.ai/’s Intelligent Document Processing solution helps to defragment data extraction from myriad documents spread across the enterprise, and thus changes the paradigm of enterprise automation, thereby accelerating innovation.
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 cfo.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.
Unlock the potential of AI-powered transformation. Talk to one of our experts 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
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.
cfo.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 cfo.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!
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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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
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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.
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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.
Unlock the potential of AI-powered transformation. Talk to one of our experts today.
Written by Babu Sivadasan, Chairman & CEO | Updated on February 2, 2021
Have you ever said, “Let’s start small and then build it up based on how it goes,”? You sure have. So have most of us. In our world, this is typically how all automation begins.
During the initial days of robotic process automation (RPA), organizations were mostly skeptical. They saw potential but were unsure of real impact.
So, they tried it out for small non-critical functions — they wanted to minimize risks. Understandably. Say, the finance department would automate one task in the Accounts Payable first such as reading data from a file and transferring that to the ERP system. However, other aspects of the Accounts Payable process would continue to remain manual. Also, understandable.
This is what is called partial automation — quite literally, automating just a part of something much bigger.
But why would anyone do that?
In fact, there are plenty of reasons for handling automation this way.
For one, the earliest automation systems could only automate basic screen capture – in other words, anything that couldn’t be seen on a screen would break the process and need manual intervention.
Some of them are financial — end-to-end automation is more expensive and incurs higher opportunity costs to run business-as-usual in the interim because every sub-task would need investment in a bot. Partial automation, on the other hand, was cheaper. Organizations could pick a few bots for shorter processes and pay-as-they-go. This also helped them understand the effectiveness of automating and calculate ROI in the longer term.
Some industries worried about security. A bank would use RPA tools to move data from a front-end system to a legacy back-end system but wouldn’t let bots analyze their customer data. Even to this day, security remains an important reason companies choose partial automation. Why risk exposing critical data while their mandate – bolstered by regulatory requirements – is to protect it and keep it confidential?
Some others just weren’t ready for end-to-end RPA — automating a process end-to-end would necessitate standardization of formats, fields and rights, and that requires an investment of finances, as well as time and energy from their internal teams.
It also didn’t help that monitoring each automated process or bot was not easy. So, there was greater risk of broken automation if the scope was end-to end.
The initial RPA landscape had its limitations, lacking seamless integration with the human input when the time came for decision-making and without a human-in-the loop concept.
Most also feared that they might not have the people trained and equipped to intervene and improve the end-to-end RPA, making it a bigger risk. Partial automation is less demanding.
To be clear, in all these cases organizations certainly understood the value of RPA, invested in partial automation and derived value from it. Most of them are “somewhat happy” with the results their RPA systems are delivering.
Partial automation only provides partial success. Why?
Process measurement issues: Partial automation meant that a major part of the processes still had to be done manually, so there was no way to measure the ROI per process or per team/department. In other words, there was no way to make a strong case for automation because the results couldn’t be measured objectively.
Efficiency deficit: The improvement in overall process efficiency, while automating only a part of it, can often be so minimal it doesn’t seem worth the effort.
Savings deficit: As efficiency is only marginally improved, cost savings also end up being marginal.
Stagnation: Partial automation can be a dead investment without the bot’s ability to learn, adapt or grow with the needs of the organization. Likewise, it can be a dead investment if the organization doesn’t have the ability to see and manage how automation is being applied across the enterprise.
Resource blocking: Without the ability to improve intelligently, partial automation still needs people to fill its gaps. This means that people continue to work on mundane tasks, leading to low productivity, fatigue and dissatisfaction.
Right, so is Intelligent Automation a possible end-to-end solution?
Intelligent or Cognitive Automation in its simplest form, is an intelligent version of RPA — one that can learn from the data and apply it to present needs. Automation can become limiting when not supported by the learning capabilities of AI, which is where intelligent automation comes into the picture. It is flexible enough to understand and adapt to non-templatized data inputs. It can process structured, semi-structured and unstructured information with ease.
Take cfo.jiffy.ai/’s cognitive automation tool, for instance. It is able to read and extract non-templatized information. Even in cases where cfo.jiffy.ai/ doesn’t understand or cannot read certain parts of the document, it will extract all the other parts and reduce manual intervention to a bare minimum. This way, with cognitive RPA, you can automate the entire process, not just a part of it.
With its ability to learn, cognitive RPA is also scalable. As a business becomes more complex and processes more intricate, cognitive RPA can learn and grow along, making the ROI significant in the long term. For instance, intelligent automation systems that trigger alerts to floor supervisors in a manufacturing unit can learn to spot newer anomalies over time, making all aspects of productivity, quality and capacity predictable. Enterprises are addressing their requirement for end-to end automation using a combination of RPA tools (for repetitive tasks), BPM tools (for process management), OCR , IDP tools (for document extraction), Data platforms for data streaming and beyond.
Instead, a platform that makes all of these features available in a single stack can help save costs and time, and also translate to easily calculable returns over a period of time. This way, they can adopt cognitive RPA for all processes, interconnect them and enable them to work in tandem.
Cognitive RPA also comes with basic skills. Pre-built RPA systems, customized for industries and functions, are now available with the ability to hit the ground running immediately. Once installed, they are in auto-pilot mode needing very little help from people, even for setup, training or maintenance.
With prior knowledge, pre-built cognitive RPA solutions can automate end-to-end with a more meaningful understanding of the process landscape.
With cognitive RPA, the solution is no longer piecemeal. Unlike partial automation, cognitive automation impacts the entire value chain.
Today’s context
The global situation businesses face today is a reason for organizations to take seriously how end-to-end automation can help them to be more resilient in the face of crisis.
As an example, a large automaker based out of Europe has worked with cfo.jiffy.ai/ in automating their financial processes. This truly helped them recently when there was no business shutdown in their country, and they continued to send in their documentation to cfo.jiffy.ai/’s offices where physical offices were shut down. Thanks to automation, backend support continued seamlessly while production continued as planned.
It is completely understandable if you have a partially automated system now. It made sense in its day. But today, to see the real value of automation, end-to-end cognitive automation is the way to go. With a clear view of the entire system, end-to-end RPA will be able to bring together various processes into a smoother journey, be it for your customers, vendors or employees. It will also future-proof you as the system understands your existing processes and can expand to accommodate newer ones.
If you have adopted partial automation and aren’t fully realizing its potential, speak to one of our consultants to explore newer avenues. We understand where you are and we’re happy to help.
Unlock the potential of AI-powered transformation. Talk to one of our experts today.
