The Impact of AI on Accounts Payable Automation

“A common challenge that businesses are experiencing today is growing revenue and expanding margins. It needs to run the business more effectively and use the power of AI to grow opportunities and analyze insufficiencies.” - Matt Stirrup, Executive Vice President of Oracle.

With continuous technological advancements, traditional processes are reshaped to offer increased efficiency and higher accuracy. That’s why Artificial Intelligence (AI) works as a transformative force, particularly in accounts payable automation.

Leveraging the power of AI will eliminate tasks like manual invoice processing, data entry, and the risk of human error. It enables businesses to streamline their accounts payable operations and transform invoice management. Let’s discover more in this blog.

AI Revolutionizing AP Automation

Traditionally, data collection, data entry, data verification, consolidation, and reporting are financial processes handled with manual effort. These manual activities result in a time-consuming, costly, and slow-to-adapt process. Meanwhile, several financial processes that use automation with AI are consistent and well-defined. For example, in the finance sector, accounts payable automation helps streamline all the processes.

With ERP systems, businesses get the power to centralize and standardize their financial processes. In the beginning, automation was rule-based, that means, after a transaction or an input occurred, it starts with a series of rules to handle. But it also needs manual maintenance and lacks the speed of AI-powered automation.

“85% finance leaders are in need of help from AI ”

That’s why AI in accounts payable process automation helps with enhanced accuracy and high-volume transactions. As a result, businesses get better data for work and more time for better utilization of data.

AI-powered Accounts Payable Automation Benefits

Here are the several advantages of using AI-based accounts payable automation in financial processes.

Increased Productivity

• It helps in faster data analysis and insights.
• It requires less time to generate narrative or statutory reports.
• It helps with higher employee productivity.
• AI in accounts payable process automation helps to create and audit financial statements quickly.
• It minimizes the time needed to complete monthly financial close.

Higher Accuracy

• Accounts payable process automation with the power of AI helps to minimize the errors in tasks.
• It offers improved forecast, planning, and modeling accuracy (like sales forecast).
• It helps to lower the risk of security events.

Business Value

• It helps to understand the business performance level.
• It offers improved profitability by analyzing the more or less profitable areas of a business.
• It also improves workforce planning, such as assessing talent gaps, predicting salary costs, and many more.
• It helps by offering a competitive advantage to businesses.

Solutions For Accounts Payable Automation

Here are the different solutions that you can consider for automating the accounts payable operations.

AI-AP Invoice Automation

The process of handling supplier invoices will become easier with AI-AP Invoice Automation. It helps businesses by converting invoices into digital format through the Artificial Intelligence engine and managing them with an intelligent workflow. As a result, the process becomes faster, errors are reduced, and better visibility into the payment and reconciliation process.

Plus, accounts payable automation saves time and resources while enhancing accuracy and efficiency in accounts payable operations. Businesses can consider the AstuteAP solution, which offers an AP Invoice Automation tool with the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI). It helps to streamline the process, reduces manual intervention, minimizes errors, and offers valuable insights for optimizing financial processes. The key features of AstuteAP include:

• Automatic Invoice Retrieval from source
• AI-enabled Invoice Capture
• Key value pair extraction, confidence score
• Invoice validation and pre-processing
• Error detection and correction
• Intelligent invoice processing in target ERP
• Pre-built integration to PeopleSoft
• EBusiness suite, JD Edwards, Ellucian Banner
• Document store for invoice lookup and achieve

AI Apps Within ERP

There are several areas where Oracle AI applications can deploy AI. Here are the different processes where you can use AI for accounts payable automation.

Accounts Payable

• With AI, businesses will get invoice entry automation.
• AI will help with early payment discounts.
• It will help businesses with prioritized exception handling.

Accounts Receivable

• It will generate credit limit suggestions.
• It will offer receipt allocations.
• AI will help with collection priorities.

Supplier Management

• Businesses will get supplier enrichment with the help of AI.
• It also saves businesses from supplier risk.
• It offers onboarding automation.

Expense Management

• It offers automated expense entry.
• AI helps with Anomaly Detection.
• It creates smart expense audits.

These automated accounts payable or finance processes result in working capital optimization, adaptive automation, Anomaly detection, and risk mitigation.

Oracle AI Apps for ERP Roadmap

Let’s discover the different AI features that Oracle provides to streamline the ERP business processes through accounts payable automation.

Intelligent Account Combination Defaulting

It is a machine-learning solution that automatically predicts and inputs distribution combination code segments for invoices that are not associated with purchase orders.

• It helps to automate regular and repetitive key entries.
• It minimizes the invoice processing time.
• It learns and improves predictions over time.

Intelligent Code Combination Defaulting

• It uses historical accounting information (transactional data that includes invoice history and how those invoices are used to create Distributional Codes) as input for training data into the ML model.
• Here, the ML model is a supervised learning algorithm known as Logistic Regression. It works by classifying the inputs and calculating the confidence score of that classification.
• Logistic Regression is chosen as the optimal model because it is designed to return a probability as its output.

Intelligent Invoice to PO Matching

It helps to automatically match invoice lines to purchase order lines. Plus, it uses machine learning to process invoices automatically and continually learn from previous transaction data.

• It lowers human intervention and human error as well.
• It helps to accelerate invoice processing time.
• It can learn and improve matching accuracy over time.

Touchless Payables

• It offers intelligent account combination defaulting.
• It has another feature that helps with intelligent PO-to-invoice line matching.
• It offers duplicate transaction detection, which helps to highlight unusual spending patterns and potentially erroneous and duplicate transactions for review.

Touchless Receivables

• With customer delinquency prediction, businesses can predict if a customer invoice payment is likely to be delinquent and predict the time to payment of customer invoices.

Automated Expenses

• It helps with smart expense audits that highlight potentially non-compliant expense receipts and outliers for audit.

If you need assistance in implementing accounts payable automation in your business, get in touch with Astute. It is an Oracle-certified solutions partner that will help you with advanced solutions powered by AI.