Accounts Payable is inherently a manual process. Lists of emails and bundles of printouts are collated for someone to type out each transaction into a financial system. The chance of human error always exists.
Modern technologies are helping to reduce this time consumption. Instead of manually scanning transactions to gather details, you can have software do this instead – using a technology called OCR (“Optical Character Recognition”). This technology converts typed, handwritten, or printed text into digital text suitable for financial software to read – and with Sage Intacct’s AP Automation, this technology will produce a draft AP purchase invoice for you to review and post.
What is Sage Intacct AP Automation?
As mentioned above, Sage Intacct AP Automation uses OCR scanning technology to read document and digital AP transactions and convert them into draft purchase invoices for the end user to check. The data that AP Automation picks up include supplier, invoice date, invoice number, currency, line item amounts, and memos. Intacct will also attach the original document for reference! How Intacct receives this data is via two user-friendly methods:
- Via email: once an invoice is received or scanned, you would simply forward the email to an Intacct-tailored email address. Intacct will then scan the documents and prepare a draft purchase invoice within Accounts Payable
- You can send single or multiple attached invoices per email!
- Via import: on the AP Purchase Invoices page, a new action for Upload is available:
A pop-up will then appear for you to select up to 30 invoices to upload.
Intacct also introduces two new invoice states. “Analysing” indicates the invoice is in the process of upload, and only the original PDF can be viewed. “Draft” means the processing is complete and the invoice can be reviewed before posting.
As with many machine learning technologies, the more you use AP Automation, the faster the AI learns, and the better it becomes at creating accurate draft invoices. The feature is designed to learn from you and your other users to recognise patterns and continuously improve their accuracy. You will often find a great improvement in data matching after a few months of regular use!
Key Benefits of AP Automation with Sage Intacct
The time saving through emailing or uploading multiple invoices at once results in less time entering data, and instead reviewing and posting the invoices themselves!
AP Automation can also recognise negative amounts too.
AP Automation leans on Sage’s Network to provide artificial intelligence. This capability is helping to automate the process and provide a secure platform within Sage’s ecosystem, and over time, this ecosystem will grow holistically to improve functionality across the board.
Things to look for:
- Each entity requires a unique email address for the system to determine the posting. These will be set for you. Furthermore, if the entity has sublocations, the system allocates the location based on the location used on the last invoice for that supplier
- Machine learning technologies need time to learn patterns – data won’t always be recognised from the off-set; it could take weeks/months to get up-to-speed
- Accepted file types for upload: PDF, JPG, JPEG, TIFF, or PNG
Getting Started with Sage Intacct AP Automation
To get started with AP Automation on your Sage Intacct, we would certainly recommend getting in touch with your Account Manager first. From here, you can see first-hand how the feature works, and understand requirements and costs, before deciding whether to proceed.
The implementation itself will require input from a Technical Consultant and input from Sage to provide the AI-connected email addresses.
Conclusion
Using artificial intelligence and machine learning is certainly the future; and with this release, Sage Intacct are automatically bringing the latest functionality to your Intacct. With help from itas, we can unlock this functionality for your Intacct and automation up-and-running! Hopefully, you can shortly time savings on data entry, and more time for the fun stuff (my choice of words)!
To iterate, this feature is brand new to Sage Intacct this month! Over the next few quarterly Sage Intacct releases, the feature will be improved upon so watch this space!
