Blog: 7 things to consider when buying an AI solution to automate purchase to pay process
Intelligent automation is fast becoming more and more common in financial administration. Using artificial intelligence (AI) as part of the purchase invoice handling process is an integral part of the day-to-day work in many companies today. In fact, AI is an effective way to automatize the posting and routing of invoices, which really helps to reduce the need to manually handle masses of invoices. This is a welcome change because manual handling is super expensive! Increasing your automation level saves you time and money both in financial administration and in business units.
But there are a few things to keep in mind when you’re planning to get an AI based solution as part of your purchase invoice process. Let’s look at those next.
Checklist for AI powered purchase invoice solutions
Before you buy any software or tool or solution, go through this list to double check you have taken into consideration everything necessary. It will help you to decide and also prevents any unnecessary surprises.
1. Test the AI to ensure the capabilities of the solution is what you need
The absolute capability of any AI solution varies because purchase data is a little different in every company. When you consider different solutions, make sure you get to test the solution before committing to it. This way you’ll find out what exactly you are getting and what kind of increase in your automation level you can expect.
2. Value based pricing – only pay for results
The point about using AI for handling purchase invoices is to increase the level of automation in your handling process. So make sure that the pricing is also tied to getting that job done. In other words: only pay for successful posting and routing of invoices.
AI will only automate those invoices that you would otherwise have to handle by hand. Posting and routing of those invoices therefore takes less time and money. 3. Simple integration – avoid heavy duty integration projects to your accounts payable system
Purchase invoice AI is always integrated into the existing purchase handling process. So that you can avoid long and expensive integration projects, make sure the AI provider has a working relationship with the software you use for handling purchase invoices. It will make your life and the cooperation with your partners so much smoother!
When the invoice purchasing AI is a complete product and not a mere customisable skeleton, it should only take about 2 to 3 weeks for the AI to be in full use. Any customisable product can take up to 6 months to do the same. 4. Transparency to AI’s capabilities – real time analytics
Ask for real time analytics so that you’ll see how well AI has posted and routed invoices. AI is a constantly learning technology and analytics will give you a window into its learning curve – not to mention that analytics will help you to report on the results.
Value based pricing is tied to analytics. If you can’t follow the progress of the AI solution, you can’t see the results and therefore the pricing cannot be based on AI’s successes. 5. Flexibility to scale together with automation
Accounts payable have a lot of opportunities for automating the invoice handling process. The routing of invoices can usually increase the automation level by several dozens of percentages. So it is really important that purchase invoice AI can scale in real time together with the accounts payable system.
For example, if the accounts payable automation in your current software can handle 30 % of invoices, AI based automation will need to automate the rest 70 %. If accounts payable automation can be increased to 35 %, AI needs to automate 65 % and so on. Flexible AI scales automatically in relation to your own rule-based automation. 6. Learning – genuine machine learning solution masters and develops new knowledge automatically
One of the great things about AI is that for every invoice it handles, it gets feedback and trains itself automatically based on it. This ensures that AI’s prediction accuracy improves constantly as it receives new invoices to handle. So it is really important to get a solution that learns and teaches itself. 7. Make sure the AI solution is secure
Purchase invoices are sensitive information for companies. That’s why it is important that whatever solution you’ll get has been certified. When a quality partner certifies the solution, you can rest assured that your sensitive information is safe and sound.
Hopefully you found these bits of advice useful in terms of acquiring purchase invoice AI. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out, we are more than happy to help!