Tag: HyperApps

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.

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.

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.

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. cfo.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 cfo.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