Sachin Sharma walks through five ways AI transforms invoice processing in accounts payable. OCR extracts data with near-perfect accuracy, machine learning automatically codes line items from historical invoices, and intelligent routing sends invoices to the right approver. The system runs overnight to prevent backlogs and capture early-payment discounts.
If you're wondering how AI is going to change ap, especially invoice processing, this video is for you. If you're still struggling with keeping up with the invoice volume, you're approving invoices manually, or your team is busy entering the data into your accounting system and you're thinking of hiding more headcount to keep up with the volume, watch this video before you do that. So in this video I'm going to talk about five areas where artificial intelligence is going to help change how you process invoices and how to make it better. Right? So let's jump right in. So number one is AI reads data better than humans, right? So always we see this, you know, when you're entering data manually, you have a invoice open on the left, the system open on the right, and you're typing it in and people make mistakes, you know, trying to enter data manually, make maybe type the date wrong or type the number wrong, amount wrong, and so on. With AI, you can actually read the whole invoice and automatically populate the data. So rather than trying to manually do it, OCR technology combined with AI can figure out, I would say close to 100% of the extraction process, right? So it can extract the data from the document, create the invoice for you. So no more data entry. Right? So that's number one. Number two is AI can code invoices better than humans. One of the main problem is you always have to go look back and say, where do I code this invoice? So if you do not have a purchase order process, you're always trying to kind of figure out when was the last time you purchased something like that, where was it coded? Let me go do some research. AI can learn all that. So if you have data from, let's say past 12 months, you can feed it to an AI engine that can learn all the coding and, and then automatically suggest coding or assign coding based on the past history. Right? So it just kind of learns better from the past data and then automate the coding. Number three is AI catches exception faster. So what I mean by exceptions is if you are matching your invoices with purchase orders or receipts, doing the manual match doesn't scale. You can make mistakes or maybe not do it at all, and then approve the invoice. And that is where AI can speed up the exception process. It can look up similar looking items, it can look up item numbers, supplier item numbers, and mash the lines automatically and figure out whether there's an exception or not. So that you can only focus on resolving exceptions rather than trying to first figure out, okay, do you have an even exception? Or this invoice is ready to pay, right? So those. That's number three. Number four is AI can route it to the right approver. One of the challenge with invoice approvals is you have to continuously figure out where does this invoice needs to go from an approval standpoint. Maybe you have approvals based on amount, but or maybe based on projects. So now you gotta figure out which project this is for and then who needs to approve it and so on. Now imagine if you can feed an AI engine and say, this is typically how we approve invoices. Because based on projects or based on some history. Now AI can take all that data and automatically generate approvals based on that, right? So it can automate your assignment of approvals, speed up the process. Your team doesn't have to worry about where does it need to go for approval. So that's number four. Number five is AI works when you sleep, right? So it's not that you now have to kind of babysit the process once you set it up, it just keeps on running on its own, keep on processing the invoices so there's no backlog of invoices that needs to be processed. Invoices are getting processed as soon as they come so that you can take advantage of either paying the vendors early and get early payment discounts, or making sure you're paying them on time. Right. Or better managing your cash flow. So if you're thinking about automating your invoicing now, this is how AI would change it. To summarize, AI reads better than humans. AI quotes better than humans, right? Number three is AI can catch exceptions faster. Number four is AI can route to the right approver. And number five is AI works while you sleep. So if you are in the market for AP automation software, click on the link below to talk to one of our product specialists to see if we can help with the AI built into the tool and speed up these processes for you. Thank you for joining me today and I'll see you in the next video.
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