Unlocking Efficiency with Touchless AP Processes
In a rapidly evolving digital landscape, achieving a seamless and efficient accounts payable (AP) process has become critical for organizations striving to maintain operational excellence. The recent EBG Webinar, hosted in collaboration with Basware, explored the transformative potential of touchless Accounts Payable processing. Here’s a deep dive into the webinar highlights and the key lessons learned.
The Challenge: Manual Processes and Their Costs
Despite advances in technology, many organizations still grapple with manual processes that bog down AP operations. These issues manifest as:
- Slow invoice processing leading to missed discount opportunities and late payment penalties.
- High employee burnout due to repetitive tasks.
- Inefficiencies stemming from poor invoice data quality and complex manual coding.
- A lack of visibility into spend data, hindering strategic decision-making.
The session underscored that relying on outdated systems exacerbates these challenges, making a compelling case for automation.
Watch the webinar On Demand
Click the image re-watch the webinar.
The Vision: Touchless Invoice Processing
Basware’s approach to touchless AP aims to eliminate manual intervention, ensuring invoices flow seamlessly from receipt to payment readiness.
The webinar highlighted three pillars essential for this transformation:
- Advanced Technology:
- Smart PDF AI: Extracts structured data from PDFs, bypassing the limitations of traditional OCR tools.
- Automated Matching: Supports one-, two- and three-way matching at line-item levels to ensure accuracy.
- Smart Coding: Uses AI to predict and recommend invoice coding based on historical data.
- Business Insights:
- Dashboards provide real-time analytics, revealing process inefficiencies and offering actionable recommendations.
- Tools like process mining uncover bottlenecks and enable continuous optimization.
- Expert Services:
- Ongoing support ensures organizations achieve and maintain optimal levels of automation.
Key Takeaways: Benefits of Automation
The webinar participants left with a clear understanding of how digital transformation in AP delivers multifaceted benefits:
- Operational Efficiency: By automating repetitive tasks, employees can focus on strategic roles.
- Employee Satisfaction: Reducing manual workload enhances job satisfaction and retention.
- Cost Savings: Faster processing enables early payment discounts and reduces penalties.
- Improved Supplier Relationships: Reliable and timely payments build trust and goodwill.
- Strategic Agility: Faster access to accurate financial insights enables better decision-making.
Future Trends in AP Automation
The session delved into forward-looking trends, emphasizing how AI, machine learning and NLP are shaping the future of AP:
- Enhanced invoice data extraction through AI-powered OCR and smart PDFs.
- Greater adoption of e-invoicing standards, particularly in Europe, to ensure structured data exchange.
- Integration of payment processing, providing a comprehensive touchless AP ecosystem.
- Intelligent tools for real-time analytics, enabling organizations to shorten their time to actionable insights.
Conclusion
The path to touchless AP is not just about technology; it requires a strategic approach to process redesign, employee engagement and vendor collaboration. As Basware’s solutions demonstrate, achieving near-total automation is within reach, offering organizations a competitive edge in an increasingly data-driven world.
For those who missed the live session, the webinar recording and slides are available upon request. Dive deeper into how your organization can harness the power of touchless AP to unlock efficiency and drive business success.
About Basware
Basware offers the largest open business network in the world and is the global leader in providing networked source-to-pay solutions, e-invoicing and innovative financing services. Our technology empowers organizations with 100% spend visibility by enabling the capture of all financial data across procurement, finance, accounts payable and accounts receivable functions. Basware is a global company doing business in more than 100 countries and is traded on the Helsinki exchange (BAS1V: HE).
Find out more via basware.com
About Kevin Permenter & IDC
International Data Corporation (IDC) is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications, and consumer technology markets.
With more than 1,300 analysts worldwide, IDC offers global, regional, and local expertise on technology and industry opportunities and trends in over 110 countries. IDC’s analysis and insight helps IT professionals, business executives, and the investment community to make fact-based technology decisions and to achieve their key business objectives.
Founded in 1964, IDC is a wholly-owned subsidiary of International Data Group (IDG, Inc.), the world’s leading tech media, data and marketing services company.
As a research director, Kevin M. Permenter provides insights and analysis across multiple Fintech market segments including accounting, revenue management, corporate tax, accounts payable, accounts receivable, treasury and enterprise payment management. Kevin leads qualitative research efforts which drive a series of technology buyer-focused documents including Marketscapes, buyer perspectives, Peerscapes and end-user surveys. He also leads several quantitative research efforts within financial applications that feed key technology supplier-focused documents like Market Shares, Market Forecast, Market Glance, Market Analysis Perspectives. Kevin’s research includes a particular emphasis on the interplay, challenges, and trends driving financial application deployment and its role in the evolution of the complex financial technology ecosystem.
Background
Prior to joining IDC in 2014, Kevin spent 12 years consulting with Fortune 500 companies in the areas of strategic planning, market analysis/projections, technology evaluation, acquisitions and customer segmentation. He has research experience in a variety of areas including Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), enterprise applications, and mobile and cloud systems. Additionally, Kevin has held various client-facing research positions at market research firm Aberdeen Group.