EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE

automation of end-to-end ap workflow

SUMMARY

Employee experience is a key facet of the digital transformation that organizations embark on. Accounting teams in most large organizations have a very important and labor intensive role to perform on the payable side.

The following sections detail out how we worked closely with the accounting department to deliver an improved and automated AP application from analysis to implementation

KEY CONSIDERATIONS

The current AP processing workflow was extremely manual. Some of the pain points were: 

  • Reduced control over On-Time Vendor payments.
  • Invoice receipt issues
  • People driven rather than process driven
  • Manual process for invoice approvals
  • Manual process for GL entries
  • Auditing Complexity
  • Post Approval Challenges

Our solution focused on process optimization and usability to automate Invoice Receipt to Post process

  • Over 100 features delivered in workflows, invoice ingestion, approvals, auditing, collaboration and integration with ERP.
  • Uses multi-level AI and ML to automatically ingest information from invoices
  • Self Learning Feedback loop established to set approvers
  • Uses RPA to surface appropriate approvals and process steps to record the invoice information and create an audit trail
  • Automatically integrates with GL to create appropriate entries 
  • Back’s up all the invoices in multiple locations to ensure redundancy

“It depends on the manager, but they are all getting A LOT quicker now. Overall average 1-2 days for an invoice to run through. If it’s someone quick, we can go through the process in just a few minutes.  I love that most of the information from the invoice is automatically generated, and I only have to edit a few things before I send it off for approval.”
– AP Specialist

KEY LEARNINGS

Requirements Gathering

  • TAOS Digital spent extensive time with the accounting team understanding the workflow and mapping out all the process steps and use cases. We then worked closely with the accounting team to outline a future workflow. However, we had to make repeated adjustments because of the complexity of the AP process. It also helps to have a domain expert with experience with the ERP and understanding of how the AP team builds it.

Implementation

  • Microsoft Power platform licensing was extremely complex to navigate. Ensure that you understand the per user and per app licensing needs of the solution and number of AI builder credits needed to process the solution
  • Power Automate user workflows have many gaps. Build your own workflow for best results
  • Power platform has certain limitations around record size. Architect your solution to work around those limitations
  • Have a good archival structure in place for older records. This keeps the data clean and the system efficient

Training & Onboarding

  • We got excellent support from the CIO, CFO, the controller, the accounting and approver teams. This was absolutely necessary during hypercare when we had business critical issues and hotfixes almost daily.
  •  The initial rollout had lots of issues because the users used the system differently than what was envisioned.
    • We spent multiple training sessions with groups of people to help them understand how to use the solution
    • We locked down the solution to reduce user error
    • We added impersonation functionality to replicate what the users were seeing
    • We built a continuous improvement program to distill and rollout feature requests from our user interactions

The Impact :

  • 10000+ invoices over the last 9 months
  • ~USD 30mm in payables processed
  • Over 75 accounting and approver users
  • 5 Different BU’s
  • 400+ Vendors
  • 98% of invoices during the period processed successfully