Accounts Payable
Unlocking Accounts Payable Auto-Posting in SAP with AI Assistants
As a financial professional you are already aware of the benefits of autonomous finance, especially when it comes to accounts payable (AP). You know autonomous finance can lead to increased efficiency, reduced operational costs by minimizing manual intervention, and improved accuracy in financial decision-making driven by advanced algorithms and artificial intelligence.
And, as an SAP ERP system user, you know SAP allows all data to be well integrated, enabling the system to streamline business processes. SAP enables your company to collect data more easily and efficiently, to automate workflows and integrate processes seamlessly.
But how can you move from automated workflows to a completely autonomous function without adding more complexity for your team?
Whether you are running SAP on premise or in a private or public cloud configuration, you can start making the switch towards autonomous finance using an AI Assistant today.
At Hypatos, we specialize in Document Hyperautomation, with many of our clients using our solution to help them implement Purchase to Pay Automation, seamlessly processing large volumes of invoices in the AP department, from within the SAP system. No additional training or user interface is required.
Before we go any further, let’s first examine the common issue that finance departments are looking to address by moving to autonomous finance and the role generative AI plays. Most staff working in AP are dealing with huge document volumes on a daily basis. For large enterprises, this could mean, for example, processing 1,300 documents daily or for a medium-sized company, anywhere between 400-600 documents. The role of invoice processing could be split into data input and account coding for large enterprises. In medium-sized companies, one person might be responsible for doing everything. Ensuring efficiency and accuracy with such huge volumes requires time and often leads to issues regarding costs and effective use of personnel.
For example, personnel often encounter a high number of invoices that have exceptions due to data errors and omissions and require additional processing. According to a report from Ardent Partners, additional processing requires an average of 22.5% extra time spent on processing. Furthermore, the invoice payment and approval process can take up to 11 days on average, making it hard to pay suppliers on time, while the average cost to process one invoice is about $10. And if you take into consideration that the average large to medium-size organization only receives 52% of invoices electronically – this means any solution needs to handle a variety of inputs including handwritten notes and support many different languages!
This is why AI is so critical. Hypatos is making a huge difference not only to AP personnel but for the company in general by improving cash flows and supplier relations, thanks to its use of third wave generative AI capabilities.
For most companies transforming their finance function, data quality is critical to successful automation. In the past it was difficult to move beyond a certain accuracy rate, because data was inserted manually and was often inconsistent or inaccurate.
If your company is on this transformational journey, it’s important to view autonomy as an evolutionary process, continually making improvements until you have a solution that works seamlessly with a minimal number of touchpoints.
Working with Hypatos, a certified SAP partner, you can unlock accounts payable posting within the SAP ERP system and achieve between 85-100% autonomy using wave 3 generative AI technology.
Our plug and play Hypatos SAP Connector for SAP ERP operates with ECC and SAP S/4HANA. It understands the SAP system and the data required to process invoices.
It enables the posting of invoices with practically no human intervention and no changes to how finance teams use their SAP systems. Even companies with older legacy systems can easily benefit from the latest generative AI offerings.
The greatest advantage of this solution is the self-learning capability provided by third wave generative AI from Hypatos. First wave AI delivers a digital foundation for data visualization and connectivity. Second wave AI delivers advanced analytics for the finance function, but third wave is the differentiator. It is at the heart of the autonomous finance revolution.
Currently, AI assistants or agents can take over tasks with superhuman speed and accuracy. Third wave generative AI relies on quickly training large language models (LLMs) that can independently generate new outputs from existing inputs. It recognizes different types of activity, identifies patterns, and can rapidly connect the dots for humans.
The beauty of Hypatos solution based on generative AI and LLMs is its ability to understand human language and respond like one of the team, making it an immediately useful assistant. The Hypatos LLM layer eliminates the need for coding and automatically understands the context of a document based on its content as well as key text regardless of language or where it appears on the document. It also uses simple human language in the form of prompts, making it the perfect stepping stone for humans to stop doing repetitive tasks and to use their time for resolving exceptions and making decisions instead.
Besides delivering top performance without increasing costs, one company that worked with Hypatos to automate its workflow into its SAP ERP system was able to upskill 20 full time employees from data entry to data mastery roles, showing the solution could add value above and beyond anything they already had in place.
Most finance professionals are already keenly aware that the rapidly changing work environment requires more successful human/machine interaction. By navigating the realms of new technologies such as generative AI, the finance team can lead the way to elevating people strategy while reducing costs and inefficiencies. It just takes the right technology fit and a well-integrated team of humans and AI assistants.
If you are an SAP customer and are interested in getting started with Hypatos, watch this webinar to learn how easy it is and what you will need, including system requirements, necessary skills and time to implement. Register Now!
To learn more about how to get the best from your mixed team of humans and AI assistants, read these additional blogs:
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