Accounts Payable Automation

What EY can do for you

Our accounts payable automation solution tackles process-related and technology-related challenges around productivity, turnaround time and accuracy -using bots. The machine learning solution looks at the invoice process holistically and uses lean process principles to decrease time.

By influencing vendors to adopt digital invoicing processes, the solution is able to triage issues upfront and send them back with reasoning, to handle issues immediately and optimize the invoice lifecycle. It’s designed to uncover vendor insights, analytics, patterns and anomalies on vendors’ behaviour, allowing additional time to take appropriate actions.

Automated processes allow for simplified metrics tracking to understand process efficiencies. Our operational dashboards provide a visualization and comprehensive overview of the solution metrics, such as bot utilization, productivity, success/fail rate, and total processing time. This allows organizations to see where improvements can be made in their accounts payable process.

Key benefits

1. Workflow with exception handling: It’s important that communication with vendors be transparent. Our solution will communicate discrepancies, reach out for approvals, validate against approval authorities and handle rule exceptions for enterprise resource planning (ERP) infrastructure or invoice types (PO and non-PO).
2. Vendor transition and onboarding: Influencing organizations to deploy proven strategies to increase the percentage of invoices submitted via e-documents is important. Along with digitizing the process, adopters are decreasing costs and cycle time.
3. Working capital strategies: A transition from a traditionally paper-based process to an automated system offers more options and freedom to optimize working capital and minimize ongoing maintenance.
4. Early payment discounts: Decrease in cycle time provides the opportunity to identify invoices that offer early payment discounts and prioritize them for processing.
5. Accelerators to provide speed to value: Our experience has allowed us to develop numerous accelerators, which we leverage to provide you with increased confidence and efficiency. 

How EY can help

While there are other automation solutions in the market that can advance accounts payable processes, EY's AP automation solution is unique. It continuously improves the technology from complex invoices received and uses machine learning and accelerators to reduce ongoing and future software maintenance. The digitized processes improve invoice tracking to provide end-to-end statuses and deep insights on the entire lifecycle.

Through application programming interfaces (APIs) or surface automation, invoices are completed efficiently and quickly. The pre-built human pathways and robust pre-tested utilities proactively identify manual exceptions for the invoice, reducing the number of exceptions. The solution scans submitted invoices and identifies which ones offer early payment discounts and accurately prioritizes them for processing.