What About all the OTHER invoices?

Halloween always makes me reflect on all the things that scare me.  These include heights, weird house noises, clowns, letters from the IRS and so much more. Working in the Procurement, Finance, and Supply Chain space for over 20 years, the common nightmare we hear about daily is – invoices.

On the surface, an invoice is a simple document.  I am a supplier.  I gave you stuff.  You agreed to pay me money.  So here is your official notice of how much I think you owe.  But, in experience it is a dynamic document with many external and internal dependencies to actually create and approve the payment.  A few are:

• Do we know this supplier?
• Did we ask them to provide the goods/services? Who asked them?  Did they get “it”?
• Is the pricing right?  Do we have a contract or PO to validate against?
• Which taxes need to be applied? What state or country did it ship from?
• Where will it be used?
• Is it an asset?
• What GL/Cost Center should this go to?
• Who needs to approve this?  Who SHOULD approve this?
• Is it an international invoice requiring special handling?

As anyone who has handled an invoice process knows, the list goes on.  Maybe the biggest horror in this story is that not many people outside of Finance take the time to think about the level of complexity they are creating for their teammates in Accounts Payable.

The Good News

Over the past 15 years, especially in the last five, solutions have been developed to address these problems.   Various solutions have entered the market from Procurement software developers, ERP systems, FinTech, even banks.  But few solutions have had success.

The challenge remains, these solutions are designed for the “straight-line method”.  Meaning an invoice that has the right information, it is tied to something like a PO and can be auto-reconciled.  While we all strive to standardize invoicing and have 100% auto-match, the reality is most companies experience only about 30-40% automation.

This is why we, at Relish, asked this important question, “What about all the other invoices?”.

The simple answer is Invoice AI. Invoice AI provides an autonomous intake channel (send us anything via email) and we will read, enrich, optimize, and validate supplier invoices. This replaces the headache of an AP clerk opening an email (dare I say envelope) and trying to decipher who, what, when, and where.

The more complex answer is, this requires a witch’s brew of technologies to work:

• Part OCR
• Dash of AI
• Sprinkle of ML
• 2 bits of the Relish Platform

AND – BOOM!  There is the solution for all your “OTHER INVOICES”.  To be clear, if you are using a solution with a network that automates a portion of your invoices – AWESOME.  We strive to complement these solutions to provide the eutopia of 90-100% invoice automation everyone has already been promised.

Trick or Treat?  Treat – try us. We would love, in 30 minutes or less, to show you how Invoice AI works.