New System Uses AI to Automate Invoices and AP

Tipalti, a global supplier payments automation solution, has introduced its Touchless Invoice Data Capture and AI-Based Approval Routing technology to its accounts payable platform. This enables invoices to be fully digitized with no intervention by accounts payable, making invoices approval-ready and ultimately payment-ready, meeting the needs of finance teams straining to cope with the scale of their organizations’ growth.

Tipalti scans invoices from emails and then automatically populates the required fields such as invoice number, supplier, quantity, and rate – including data in 27 languages. Once an invoice is added to Tipalti, the optical character recognition (OCR) technology supporting the Touchless Invoice Data Capture capability eliminates the need for manual processing. If the invoices scanned through OCR aren’t a 100% match, an escalation layer provided by Tipalti automatically routes the invoices to a managed service that manually reviews invoices, checks fields for accuracy and populates any missing fields. Machine learning of past invoice history enables OCR match rates to improve over time. This ensures invoice data capture remains completely touchless for the AP team while also assuring processing accuracy.

The AI-Based Approval Routing engine then proactively assigns the bill approval sequence based on patterns learned from historical approval sequences. Email notifications are automatically routed to the appropriate approvers to action, ensuring compliance with the organization’s existing internal control processes.

The return on investment of this new Touchless Invoice Data Capture capability can be significant. An organization processing 500 invoices a month could save over $100K annually from Tipalti’s touchless invoice technology alone.

“Manual invoice processes stymie today’s finance organization and hold back the CFO from helping the business scale rapidly and be more successful,” said Chen Amit, CEO of Tipalti. “By applying the latest OCR and AI technologies, along with managed services to address any exceptions, businesses can finally modernize their finance operations with a touchless invoice process. Directly integrating these features within the end-to-end supplier payments process means that AP teams will have significant time freed to focus on other business critical tasks.”

“Tipalti’s unified approach to the entire invoice-to-pay process has enabled us to scale more efficiently and cost effectively,” said Laurence Zuriff, Chief Financial Officer at Xometry, an online marketplace for custom machining and manufacturing. “With over 1,000 supplier invoices each month coupled with our anticipated growth rate this year, we need to reduce as much manual processing of invoices as possible. Tipalti streamlines the entire the supplier payment workflow, which is critical to our operating model and the ongoing relationships with our manufacturing partners.”

Tipalti’s Touchless Invoice Data Capture and AI-Based Approval Routing technology is integrated seamlessly into Tipalti’s unified supplier payments automation solution, so that all core AP processes are managed seamlessly in one place. The Tipalti AP capabilities include supplier onboarding, tax compliance, invoice processing, global supplier remittance, early payments, and payment reconciliation and AP reporting.