Co-Founder, JIFFY.ai | Pioneer in Finance Automation and AI | Dedicated to Empowering Finance Teams and Unlocking Business Value through Intelligent Technology
Kris Subramanian is the Co-Founder of JIFFY.ai and a pioneer in finance automation and AI. With over 24 years of experience in the IT industry, Kris brings a rare blend of expertise in technology, sales, and leadership. He has successfully built high-performance teams and scaled operations across global enterprises and startups alike, including leadership roles at TechMahindra and Capgemini. At JIFFY.ai, he leads business growth across emerging markets and drives strategic partnerships to unlock business value through intelligent technology.
Automation-driven autonomy is here and it’s real. Are you ready for it?
We embarked on materializing the concept of an integrated intelligent automation platform for enterprises back in 2019. The journey so far has been nothing short of a thriller. Today we have passed another significant milestone in this amazing journey.
We secured Series B funding from investors including Eight Roads Ventures, Iron Pillar, R-squared, Nexus Venture Partners, Reaction Capital and Rebright Partners. We are using this fund to further advance our intelligent automation platform to the next level.
As the first step, we built the low-code intelligent automation platform and pre-packaged HyperApps that accelerated the business processes of customers from few key verticals. Global leaders in Automotive, Banking, Media, Telecom, and Travel industries have been using HyperApps built on the platform and reaping quick ROI benefits.
AI-driven decision making
Let us imagine that a Financial Advisor is seeking an appropriate product for their client. The automated front-office technology powered by JIFFY.ai uses AI to suggest a product, and enables the Financial Advisor to satisfy the client’s need. All relevant data will be captured and shared with the mid and back-office systems real-time.
Earlier, effecting such changes on the legacy infrastructure would claim six to nine months of large enterprise IT teams, by which time the consumers would start clamoring for fresh product features or service bundles.
Over the last 18 months, we have cut short the window to deliver a custom HyperApp for new business processes. We build it in 3 months even with dynamic changes happening in real-time, and even while the app is in production. So, enterprises can accelerate innovations and go to market quickly, not worrying about infrastructure availability when they have to scale up and down.
Building ‘The Intelligent Mailroom’ with Docupace
We are building the wealth management industry’s most powerful suite of automation solutions; deploying leading-edge capabilities such as intelligent document processing, AI, RPA, ML and advanced analytics to deliver benefits at scale across enterprise operations along with Docupace, the leader in cloud-based fintech digital operations software.
As the first step towards creating this innovative suite of back-office automation applications, we are building the Intelligent Mailroom with Docupace – a point of entry for the majority of all documents processed and data coming into an organization. The first-of-its-kind solution replaces manual indexing and processing with intelligent, comprehensive automation increasing productivity, improving accurate document processing, and reducing operational burden and costs on the overall organization. It also empowers growth-minded firms to refocus valuable resources to more impactful activities.
The way forward
We are incrementally adding value to the integrated automation platform that will soon be the no-code autonomy backbone of choice for enterprises in any industry.
With timely support from investors and partners we have been able to build and test its scalability for large enterprises, including the Fortune Global 500 and the Big4 Consulting firms. The encouraging response from our customers, business users and investors are prompting us to flex our imagination and stretch our innovation further.
Ready to free your enterprise for growth in the future?
The impact of automation is real, and it is no longer a luxury.
Enterprises across industries are moving fast towards an autonomous future in which they aspire to be resilient, scalable, and adaptable. Intelligent business applications that run their processes will be able to learn and adapt to changing situations impacting the business landscape and even mimic human thinking and actions intelligently.
A significant percentage of their operations will be handled by smart software and machines —of course, with human in the loop for guidance and monitoring as circumstances change. Industry analysts and futurists agree that moving ahead in this direction can yield significant benefits such as greater productivity, better customer experiences, and faster growth.
Are you ready to build responsible autonomy into the future of your enterprise?
How AI-powered Autonomous Finance Technology Helps Connect the CFO’s Office and Ensures Finance Transformation
Strengthening and energizing your business model requires a lot more than refining supply channels. Modernizing and streamlining the Financial value chain operating through the CFO’s)Office is just as essential. If the CFO does not participate in an ongoing integration project, they lose an excellent opportunity to shape how those integrations will impact work.
Research shows that 1 in 3 Financial leaders prioritize having an integrated, single source of data as the biggest change they expect from digital transformation. Autonomous Finance technology takes you closer to the goal of Finance transformation with an integration-first approach, among other benefits.
RPA Alone Is Not Enough
When companies adopt traditional robotic process automation (RPA) for Accounting and Finance, a lack of integration within the CFO’s Office is a common challenge. Initiatives to modernize Procure-to-Pay (P2P), Order-to-Cash (O2C), and Record-to-Report (R2R)— three key financial processes—can quickly fall through the gaps when Marketing and Sales teams – and not the CFO’s office – drive almost every aspect of digital transformation.
Other departments simply “leave it to the CFO,” assuming that the CFO’s Office possesses the inherent expertise to drive automation, integration, transformation and other initiatives. The problem with this approach is that while everything else is being digitally transformed and optimized, Financial integration within the CFO’s Office is often left behind.
According to a recent study, CFOs are eager to embrace the digitization of nearly every Finance & Accounting (F&A) function. Seventy-four percent of global CFOs are looking to accelerate into an era of enhanced reporting, moving beyond traditional R2R. Advanced analytics is a top priority with more than 1 in 3 CFOs investing in related technologies over the upcoming years. Without integrated Financial systems, these projects will fall short of expectations.
What Happens When Finance Systems Do Not Speak?
Most businesses rely on different systems to meet various operational requirements. Different architectures prevent these disparate systems from interacting. In the absence of data interactivity, information silos form, inhibiting growth and holding back opportunities for automation or more advanced autonomous decision-making.
This problem is further compounded in large organizations. The greater the size of the business, the larger the number and intricacy of its components—spanning numerous departments, sub-entities, and stakeholders. This complexity permeates the CFO’s Office, where work involves sourcing and procurement (part of P2P), financial analysis and planning (R2R), risk mitigation and regulations, as well as reconciliations (part of O2C).
To administer these complex processes, most F&A teams use a mix of point solutions, including spreadsheets, RPA bots, and ERP and CRM tools, among other technologies. In addition, the treasury employs a separate system because it requires an intricate structure to oversee settlements, legal compliance, liquidity, and cash.
With the ecosystem built on independent, siloed solutions piled on top of each other, extracting data in a timely manner becomes tedious and time-consuming. The pivotal P2P, O2C, and R2R processes remain disconnected, the back and front office systems do not speak to each other, and the entire environment is unsuitable for Autonomous Finance, which is far more mature and streamlined than traditional RPA.
For example, if an important transaction such as procurement in P2P goes awry, the CFO does not have immediate insights into the issue, because the relevant data resides in a system to which only the procurement staff has access. By contrast, R2R operates separately and without real-time synchronization.
This means the CFO must traverse a labyrinth of solutions to garner, review, and share an accurate perspective of the issue to other stakeholders. As such situations can arise on a daily basis, the CFO gets encumbered with daily transactions, and is left with less time for strategic decision-making.
How Can Autonomous Finance Technology Help Accelerate Finance Transformation?
Autonomous Finance technology can play a vital role in addressing these issues. Powered by Generative AI and built on no-code technology, an Autonomous Finance platform can help to complete digital transformation in the CFO’s Office and make it meaningful for every stakeholder in the F&A ecosystem.
The technology ensures that the P2P, O2C, and R2R processes are straight-through and streamlined, brings autonomous decision-making capabilities to F&A processes, and also makes sure that the front and back offices can speak to each other and exchange data. It demolishes information silos and reduces overreliance on coding and IT efforts.
Autonomous Finance helps CFOs to adopt a micro-innovation approach; the platform provides building blocks to create intelligent self-learning and evolving apps to streamline various use cases – from price blocks and cash allocations, to cash flow, payment prioritization, and many more. These apps come with pre-built data models and system connectors designed to overcome the lack of interconnectivity within the CFO’s Office, and between Financial processes and the rest of the enterprise.
3 Ways an Autonomous Finance Platform Connects and Speeds Up Financial Processes
Implementing an Autonomous Finance platform is a quick and effective way to overcome integration challenges and achieve autonomous decision-making capabilities. It helps CFOs facing system and information silos in the following ways:
1. Empowers business users to build rapid solutions
Traditionally, RPA automation relies on detailed scripts and extensive coding efforts. In the face of exceptions, this approach further adds to cost and operational overheads. On the other hand, Autonomous Finance empowers business users to build their own solutions involving complex third-party interconnections by leveraging their domain knowledge and understanding of the business. As it is a no-code platform, accountants, procurement professionals, and other executives in the CFO’s Office can quickly turn their visions into action.
2. Makes use of pre-built models and workflows
Autonomous technology goes beyond RPA in Finance, providing users with pre-built modules based on industry knowledge. This includes data models, workflows, Finance widgets, and system connectors that allow the different nodes of the CFO’s Office—P2P, O2C, and R2R, – to talk to each other. Integrations can be built faster without compromising the quality of app development, and also without too much technical dependence.
3. Opens up opportunities to integrate Generative AI
Generative AI has unlocked new frontiers in Finance transformation. It can cut across system and data silos to accelerate app development and facilitate insights-driven decision-making. For example, an Autonomous Finance platform powered by Generative AI can be used to build Financial apps (or any other apps) 10X faster, by providing real-time suggestions, intelligent recommendations, and best practices for creating or customizing AI-powered hyper-automated apps. The platform also streamlines the flow of data between these processes to seamlessly connect disparate elements of the CFO’s Office.
The Age of Autonomous Finance is Here
Tedious manual processes impede the speed and efficiency of critical F&A tasks such as invoice processing, and managing the collection and reconciliation of receivables. This, in turn, extends Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) metrics and reduces net revenue resulting from delayed payments and inefficiencies in cash management. Even though automating these processes partly helped to curtail DSO to a certain extent, human involvement has still been necessary to ensure the right outcomes.
In 2023 and beyond, CFOs should no longer struggle with the age-old problems of data deficiency and disconnected systems. CFOs advocating for Finance transformation through end-to-end automation in their organizations should consider switching to AI-powered Autonomous Finance technology. It helps them to achieve “touchless” F&A, significant cost reductions, and lower average DSO figures, while enhancing resilience and transparency in the face of unforeseen cash-flow challenges.
Accelerate Order-to-Cash and Record-to-Report processes with JIFFY.ai’s HyperApps.
One of the biggest reasons why businesses put off automation is that it can seem overwhelming in scope. Back in 2020, business process automation was estimated to be a $2.53 billion market, but it was given a big thrust by the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Deloitte analysts, two-thirds of business leaders used automation to respond to the impact of the pandemic this year, and adoption numbers were up by 15% from the last year.
Clearly, if you were planning to embark on that ambitious enterprise automation project, the best time to begin is “right now”. But before that you might need a solid checklist to identify which processes to target first, and where to begin.
Tackling enterprise automation one step at a time
It is a common misconception that enterprises exist either as a fully manual-effort-reliant or as 100% automated. In reality, automating entire process monoliths is a complicated task; rather breaking workflows down into manageable micro-services and automating them is a smarter approach. This way, you can extract component tasks that are of varying degrees of frequency and variability.
High frequency, low variability tasks are the prime candidates for automation. They require immediate automation attention so you can avoid losing out any more on efficiency gains. Low frequency, low variability tasks are also very automation-ready – but they might require more time to yield ROI that you should showcase, or they may not even need automation if you already have them running smooth with the help of your staff.
Low frequency, high variability tasks (for example, redesigning your brand logo) are least suited for automation as they typically involve a high degree of cognitive efforts.
Finally, high frequency, medium variability tasks promise the best returns from automation implementation. An intelligent automation solution can effectively reconcile any exceptions the workflow faces, given its variability levels. With this, you can liberate your skilled staff from these tasks completely. Due to their high frequency in the business fabric, organizations stand to save significantly by automating such processes.
No matter where a specific task falls on the frequency variability matrix, it is advisable to break it down to manageable services before starting to automate it. There’s one more important step before kick-starting your enterprise automation project —assessing the organizational landscape for automation-readiness.
Is your organization ready for automation? Here’s the checklist
This checklist serves two purposes – taking stock of your strategic readiness and understanding your technology needs.
Do you have prior experience in automating processes?
How do decision-makers feel about the ROI of automation?
Have you identified the right automation technology?
Is your process defined and documented?
Is the process frequently occurring?
Is the process consistent/stable?
Is the process digitized/ready to be digitized?
The answers to these questions can help shape your automation strategy and determine the automation approach to choose, and thereby enable you to take the first significant step towards evolving into an autonomous enterprise.
Wish to explore this automation-readiness checklist in more detail and gather practical insights on the hurdles en route before commencing your enterprise automation project?
Today, the Accounts Payable (AP) team of an enterprise has a significant role to play in supporting the business —by managing supplier payments efficiently so that business isn’t interrupted.
Moving beyond their traditional responsibilities, AP teams are also driving growth, optimizing working capital, and mitigating risks. Therefore, ensuring maximum efficiency in their processes has become the prime focus of every organization.
One of the key hallmarks of efficiency in the AP function is the ability to leverage technology to achieve Straight Through Processing (STP) of invoices.
What is Straight Through Processing? Why can’t every company achieve this?
In the context of AP, straight through, or ‘touchless,’ processing is defined as an invoice being received, approved, and paid without any manual intervention. With automated STP capability, the AP team can process a vastly higher number of invoices quicker and with far lesser effort. STP brings in enormous value as it is significantly cheaper and faster than any other invoice-approval workflow process.
Almost seven in ten AP teams (as many as 72%) spend up to 10 people-hours per week, or 520 hours per year on tasks that could be automated — such as invoice processing, supplier inquiries, supplier payments execution, PO matching, new supplier registration, and payment reconciliation. According to APQC, the cost of processing an invoice manually varies between $2 and $10 – and these are very conservative numbers.
Though most organizations realize the need to achieve true straight through processing of invoices, many find it tough to choose the right technology that can help them address all the perceived challenges involved.
Why OCR and RPA ‘bots’ are not intelligent enough
Gathering all the necessary information spread across invoices in multiple formats, item description matching, data cleansing and exception handling are the most important tasks of invoice processing.
Industry-favorite Optical Character Recognition (OCR) solutions fail through most of these processes. As they scrape data from the screen, errors are bound to happen and invariably your AP team members must spend hours or even days reviewing the data and tracking down the missing pieces. They might also have to cross-check whether the extracted invoice data conforms with the PO requirements and business rules. Errors and mismatches could spring up anywhere in price, quantity, dates, conversion of currencies, etc.
On the other hand, RPA ‘bots’ deployed in these processes have simply not been able to scale. Most organizations that have implemented RPA have not made it beyond a handful of business processes even after several years of work.
RPA brings in an additional layer of architecture into the technology stack – or technical debt – which requires additional governance efforts. Even a minor change made to the UI, APIs or data transposition could potentially interrupt the bots’ functionality. Such breakdowns in automation can cause downtime and lost business value with the potential need for additional technical resources.
In order to avoid these cost and effort overheads, future-oriented AP teams are adopting intelligent automation to achieve STP for invoices. Intelligent automation platforms leverage the powers of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) and are the true enablers of STP in invoice processing.
Intelligent invoice processing automation with JIFFY.ai HyperApp
JIFFY.ai’s Invoice Processing HyperApp is a low-code application that helps your AP team to achieve end-to-end straight through processing. Its automated workflows connect seamlessly with third-party business systems such as ERPs. Pre-configured business rules enable your AP team to handle disruptions in the receipt of invoices, including fluctuations in invoice volumes, and suppliers requesting part or early payments.
With intelligent document processing capabilities, it can handle structured (e.g., invoices, loan applications etc.) and semi-structured (e.g., financial reports) data from many types of documents, and ‘learn’ these variances continuously. It can extract complex data from OCR, handwritten notes, and even from tables within PDF documents (deep document processing) thus enabling completely ‘touchless’ processing. By helping your AP team to set up a supplier portal, it enables suppliers to submit invoices electronically, and also to speed up the approval processes with minimal manual intervention.
As we wrap up the first half of 2021, several parts of the world are still reeling under the impact of the successive waves of the pandemic. Maintaining business continuity and building resilience for predictable growth is an imperative for businesses across the world. With industries gearing up for bullish economic weather, business leaders are leaving no stone unturned to remove all process bottlenecks that could pose hurdles in their resurgence strategies. Your Accounts Payable team plays a central role here, maintaining transactional integrity, ensuring sustainable cash flow, and powering your core business, often with limited and restricted resources.
Process modernization and optimization are key priorities for Accounts Payable teams that have already embarked on this transformational journey. According to the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic survey by the Association for Financial Professionals (AFP), 65% of businesses will move from paper payments to electronic formats, while 38% will rewire their internal procedures. Digitization will pave the way for smarter, more efficient processes, where employees need to spend far fewer person-hours to complete routine tasks, thus unlocking savings as well as ushering in an overall culture shift.
If your Accounts Payable team is already on this superfast transformation highway, here are five key takeaways for you:
1. Consolidate the digital forays of the previous year
The first step towards building a futuristic invoice processing strategy should be consolidating the fragmented digital transformation initiatives undertaken last year. In 2020, businesses had to adopt remote-friendly processes and support Accounts Payable teams as they started to work from home almost overnight. In some cases, this added to process complexity as simple in-person tasks (e.g., paper-based approvals) were no longer possible. Supplier/vendor network management also went digital, which has its own risks in the long term. At this point, it is vital to consolidate any point solutions you might have in place, take stock of vendor sentiment and any user experience bottlenecks they might be facing, and evaluate the projected total cost of ownership of your Accounts Payable systems beyond the pandemic.
2. Optimize cash flow to prepare for unexpected challenges
The pandemic left very little room for error in cash flow management, and this trend will continue in the second half of 2021 as economies recover and businesses return to their growth trajectory. A report by the International Labor Organization found that cash flow was the #1 problem faced by 4500+ companies in 45 countries worldwide. Improving Accounts Payable efficiency and modernizing your invoice processing strategy could help optimize cash flow. For instance, recommendations generated by cognitive technologies could suggest changes in the order of supplier payments that would maximize your cash on hand. These technologies can assign risk scores to every vendor and make sure that you gain from early payment discounts.
3. Upskill your AP team to perform and innovate
The year 2020 marked a tectonic shift in how we work, and this will have a lasting impact on workplace culture, how employees approach routine tasks, and their aspirations for the future. In the absence of a physical office and the physical presence of a professional community, inefficiencies in business processes became starker. Your employees are now less likely to be satisfied with repetitive, high-volume tasks in this ‘work from home’ season. There are two major action points for businesses through the year 2021. Eliminate mundane, iterative and non-fulfilling work wherever possible (this has typically been a chronic challenge for the Accounts Payable team). Employees who are freed up can be up-skilled to focus on more innovative work, such as in decision-making, the use of advanced technology systems, and discretionary problem-solving: essentially, tasks that machines cannot perform.
4. Adopt agile workflows to gain from dynamic economic weather
Through the rest of this year, businesses can look forward to a largely optimistic economic forecast, albeit with occasional regional curveballs on the way. In the last couple of quarters, we saw the International Monetary Fund revise its predictions several times, underscoring the need to stay agile and adaptive. In this context, rigid Accounts Payable workflows and monolithic processes will make it difficult to keep pace with fluctuating conditions. Instead, businesses must establish processes that are easy to configure – onboarding new suppliers with minimal risk or delays to support renewed demand, reconciling invoice exceptions and corrections seamlessly, and scaling up without adding complex approval red tape.
5. Leverage intelligent invoice processing automation to scale sustainably as you grow
The best-case scenario to look forward to this year is a rapid return to the original growth trajectories, aided by a resurging economy in 2021-2022. Businesses cannot afford to let speed-breakers such as inefficient processes, errors arising from human fatigue, and the risk of non-compliance, slow down this journey. The Accounts Payable function as a whole — and invoice processing, specifically — is part of the core of any organization. As the throughput of your Accounts Payable team increases, its invoice processing capability must focus on increasing straight through processing capacity. That way, it can scale in tandem to make profitability truly sustainable and mitigate the impacts of any further unprecedented disruptions. Strengthening this function using cutting-edge technology, helping your AP team and the supplier network, and the business as a whole should be a key agenda item in your strategy.
Your top strategic priority for the emerging future should be to remove the bottlenecks in the invoice processing function, and intelligent automation can play a key role here. Here are a few points to ponder:
An intelligent automation solution can centralize the steps taken to digitize invoice processing in specific business units, regions, and teams amid the rushed switch to remote operations.
It can equip your AP function with customizable supplier portals, AI/ML insights, and suggestions for decision-making based on your business rules, thus optimizing cash flow.
It can ingest invoicing data from EDI file formats, XML/JSON files, mailbox attachments, and scanned images, making life simpler for your AP team working remotely; automated data extraction, validation, and exception handling further reduces repetitive manual work and probable errors.
An end-to-end intelligent automation platform makes touchless processing a reality by supporting highly configurable workflows, where you can specify thresholds for manual approval, fraud signals, vendor prioritization and more, depending on changing market conditions.
Invoice processing costs can be optimized as your business operations scale (thanks to a scalable solution architecture and volume-friendly pricing model), making the investment in digitalizing your Accounts Payable function truly sustainable for the long term.
Learn how JIFFY.ai’s intelligent Invoice Processing HyperApp has been enabling customers from various industries to prioritize these five capabilities. In fact, these are a part of our central value proposition to future-proof the Accounts Payable function. Drop an email to marketing@jiffy.ai today.
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.
JIFFY.ai delivers invoice processing and accounts payable automation benefits for small businesses, large finance and accounting teams and every organization in between. We can help them achieve 80% STP and reduce the human efforts needed to process invoices from a new supplier to 0%. Sophisticated AI and ML-based workflows allow you to look beyond just replicating age-old manual processes in a digital wireframe. Leveraging our intelligent and scalable automation HyperApps, we are committed to helping future-oriented enterprises derive business value across critical functions like accounts payable.
Get the Benefits of Accounts Payable Automation with JIFFY.ai
If you want to iron out bottlenecks or inefficiencies in your business processes through sustainable, intelligent invoice processing automation, please email us at marketing@jiffy.ai. Our HyperApps experts will be happy to help you accelerate!
Unlock the potential of AI-powered transformation. Talk to one of our experts 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:
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
How to build efficiency using intelligent automation and cognitive procurement
When we think of robotic process automation (RPA) in procurement, we know that adoption is rising. Many businesses already use RPA in their value chain. For those businesses that aren’t, it is a matter of “when” and not “if” they will use RPA.
In a domain as complex as procurement, robotic process automation ensures that most tasks and processes are automated at a fraction of the cost of adding headcount/resources or deploying new teams. Another benefit of procurement automation is the ability to work around the clock, which significantly reduces dependence on human resources.
The true value of RPA is the ability to repeat complex tasks and follow decision trees effectively. As machine learning, cognitive processing and natural language processing gain traction and advance at an accelerated pace, it is only natural to integrate these systems with RPA to deliver a more effective solution across the value chain.
Let’s dive deeper into why machine learning, cognitive processing, natural language processing, analytics and RPA must go hand-in-hand. We’ll also discuss how learning algorithms coupled with RPA’s execution capabilities are the future of full automation — especially after the pandemic.
What is Cognitive Procurement?
In the field of supply chain automation, cognitive procurement refers to the process of using automation with machine learning, analytics, and other cutting-edge technologies to help automate further, faster, and more efficiently.
Procurement as a process is characterized by large amounts of unstructured data, which may be impossible to process using traditional systems. Apart from solving the problem of unstructured data handling, cognitive procurement also helps:
Transform all existing purchase and transfer order systems
Transform supplier onboarding and the associated processes
Forecast prices and inventory needs
Create reports with usable data
Power better decision-making
Conduct risk assessment to prepare for known threats to the value chain
The best part? A cognitive procurement solution can also connect to external data sources and tie these parameters into the recommendations it makes. RPA alone may not be enough, but when it’s supported with the right data and learning systems the procurement possibilities are nearly endless.
Intelligent RPA and its Role in Cognitive Procurement
Cognitive procurement is often referred to as the final frontier in the procurement process. However, wisdom and experience show that there is still much to learn. In the era of information, we need a system that can handle three aspects of any complex task:
Research and data processing: This is where analytics come into the picture.
Learning from past data to make accurate predictions for the future: Machine learning works on the principle that when an artificially intelligent system is given enough data, it can make decisions as good as or better than those made by a person.
Execution: Any plan is only as good as its implementation, the sheer volume of work and the number of branches in the process. Post-machine learning interventions need RPA to help in seamless execution.
As a final product of automated procurement, businesses with a vast and demanding procurement function can expect to:
Achieve efficiency in analyzing their data
Manage their supply risk
Procure and pause material based on real-time needs
Plan logistics for better efficiency and optimized costs
Evaluate their suppliers based on their monthly, quarterly or annual performance across as many parameters as needed
Provide 24/7 support throughout
Why Should You Implement an Intelligent RPA Solution in Procurement?
According to a KPMG research report, “Delivering Value in Procurement With Robotic Process Automation,” implementing intelligent RPA can cut procurement costs more than 50%, increase return on investment (ROI) by five times and reduce the number of strategic suppliers by nearly 50%. These numbers should eliminate the concern over RPA’s cost-to-benefit ratio, which is a frequent barrier to implementation.
How Should Businesses Decide Where and How to Implement RPA in Their Procurement Process?
Start by reviewing existing procurement processes to identify areas where the scope for automation is high. These tasks often represent repetitive actions that offer less value per extra time unit spent.
However, for an RPA system to work, the process needs to have a clear workflow and lead to non-ambiguous outcomes. Technical specifications include processes that run in relatively stable environments and cases where manual intervention to solve an impasse can be kept low.
Next, identify the processes based on how much business impact automation could create and how much effort might be necessary to implement RPA. With these conditions in mind, classify the tasks into low-impact, low-effort-to-implement processes, which make for good early adoption and trial cases, and high-impact, high-effort-to-implement processes, which can effectively transform the business.
As a process laden with numbers and data, procurement presents the best-use case for implementing RPA in tandem with data analytics and machine learning. Companies that have already done so report unprecedented results across crucial parameters.
A fear of “machines taking over the world” is one barrier to implementing robotic process automation in procurement. But machine control in cases as complex as a global supply chain may be a good thing, as the pandemic’s disruption to this key process has shown.
The human capital that is freed from the clutches of repetitive tasks and handling data too complex to process can now be used in functions needing more human intervention and creativity. This leaves the machines to do what they do best — repeat every process error-free, follow the rules and use data effectively.
Contact JIFFY.ai for the Help You Need
Now that you know more about the role of robotic process automation in procurement, you’re ready to discover how to transform your business with AUTOMATE. Our easy-to-use intelligent automation platform empowers your teams to innovate faster. Contact us to learn more.
Unlock the potential of AI-powered transformation. Talk to one of our experts today.
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. 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
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 JIFFY.ai
You can use office automation systems developed with 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.
Unlock the potential of AI-powered transformation. Talk to one of our experts today.
Does your enterprise deal with an army of suppliers regularly? Is significant team effort spent on reviewing and sorting a multitude of invoices, but you still end up with late or erroneous payments?
Time to take a look at how JIFFY.ai’s Automated Invoice Processing HyperApp can help you save more by making the right payments at the right time.
The Hassles of Manual Invoice Processing
Any manual process is by its nature more tedious and error-prone than an automated solution. The incremental issues that arise when invoice payments are delayed or inaccurate can lead to severe issues in partner relationships and even break the supply chain.
Manual processing is costly and drawn-out and often fraught with a lot of duplicate and erroneous entries. The enterprise is left dealing with collateral damage in many ways:
Strain in supplier relationships and a threat to company reputation
Loss of purchase discounts in the invoice payment process
Inclusion of late penalties, increasing the costs
Rework to correct the errors adds to the processing time and costs more to the company
Erroneous invoices may take weeks to straighten out with the suppliers and hamper the end-of-month closure of accounts
Need Of The Hour – An Intelligent Invoice Processing System implemented through Accounts Payable Automation
According to AQPC’s Open Standards Benchmarking Accounts Payable 2020 survey, on average top-performing companies report that nearly 0.8% of their annual disbursements are duplicate or erroneous. On the other hand, bottom performers report more than twice the amount, at 2% of total annual payments. Just look at this in light of your yearly invoice payment numbers, and it will be staggering enough to take a real relook at the process.
An automated invoice processing system helps in cultivating positive vendor and supplier relations. It enables users to maintain accurate records and respond to invoices in a timely fashion while ensuring prompt payments and precise records of supplier relationships.
RPA-Enabled Vs JIFFY.ai’s Intelligent HyperApp Invoice Automation
RPA can quickly automate repetitive tasks in the invoice process and works on a rule-based approach. You can specify rules to flag exceptions when certain conditions are met and raise a request to the human agent to resolve the issue before the payment is approved. An intelligent Accounts Payable automation system applies NLP and Machine Learning (ML) on top of RPA extending RPA’s ability to provide substantial augmentation.
Our HyperApp Invoice Automation solution builds on RPA’s capabilities to ensure the invoice is accurate before being sent for payment.
ML examines data captured in different fields and tries to establish a mapping between fields that hold the same pattern of data values
Robust in handling the cognitive 3-way match between the Purchase Order, report of goods received, and the invoice
Helps to check if the invoice is accurate, is not a duplicate and the invoice corresponds to the goods requested and received
Can learn as fast and accurately as experienced humans in identifying and interacting with suppliers, automatically performing input intake, coding, processing and routing invoice workflows, denoting payment deadlines, approval workflows and approvers. It requires human interaction only at critical checkpoints.
Makes it easy for supplier business users to interact directly with the invoice process through easy to use interfaces
Provides the analytic ability to detect payment schedules well in advance, to reduce errors, and to save costs by incorporating purchase discounts in the invoice process
Improves cash flow transparency with the validation engine confirming the accuracy of invoices before pushing them into the ERP system and reducing the need for downstream updates
Invoice Right on Time with JIFFY.ai’s HyperApp
JIFFY.ai’s HyperApp’s unique features for accurate invoice processing are:
Intelligent Invoice Extraction – with built-in cognitive capabilities to handle complex invoices like line items, tables, etc. and the cognitive capability can automatically create templates for new invoices
Customizable Supplier Portal – exercises full control over portal customizations to ease supplier onboarding and ongoing invoice management
Configurable Workflows – allows faster implementation cycles, additions of new suppliers or new product lines, configurable for a multitude of suppliers and invoice types
Powerful Validation Engine – ensures all validation is handled ahead of ERP to avoid downstream updates in the ERP system
Powerful Data Analytics – the underlying data layer allows us to provide analytics around the process itself and also around business intelligence
Pluggable ERP connectors – can plug directly into your existing infrastructure
Impactful ‘App’lications
Many organizations have reported reduced errors and improved overall process efficiency after implementing the JIFFY.ai HyperApp solution for their invoice process.
Intelligent Accounts Payable automation of the complex invoice process with a more collaborative and connected approach and smarter, dynamic data-driven decision-making ability is required in today’s hyper-competitive, fast-paced business landscape. The JIFFY.ai HyperApp solution is the right choice for you to transform your invoice process, increase your revenue and maintain trust with your suppliers.
Drop an email to marketing@jiffy.ai and our HyperApps experts can help you accelerate invoice processing, straight through!
Unlock the potential of AI-powered transformation. Talk to one of our experts today.
