Oracle Payables with AI-driven autonomous invoice processing automation

We recently held a webinar discussing how Oracle Payables customers can fully automate all invoices when combined with AppZen’s Finance AI. Watch the on-demand recording now.

Here are some top key takeaways.

Supercharge Oracle Payables with AI-driven Autonomous AP

Oracle Payables has become the cornerstone of many organizations’ AP operations, and for good reason. Whether it’s deployed as part of Oracle EBS or via Oracle Fusion, it places some truly outstanding AP capabilities at your fingertips, when fully leveraged.

There are many standout features that our customers tell us make their lives easier, including a highly flexible Chart of Accounts (COA); global, multi-organizational capabilities; strong approval workflows; incredibly robust payment capabilities; and deep, General Ledger (GL) integrations. Yet, we also hear of persistent frustrations around dealing with a high volume of manual invoices in their AP inboxes.

This is where AppZen can play a pivotal role.

AP Automation solutions — an age-old challenge

For the past decade or so, organizations have been steering their vendors toward using XML, EDI, and supplier portals/networks in an attempt to streamline and automate AP processes.

While there have been some successes, these initiatives haven’t had the desired effect. For most enterprises, the proportion of manual invoices still sits somewhere between 30% and 80%, arriving via an AP inbox, as an email attachment, or even by fax or snail mail.

This means AP teams still face the same challenges that they did back in the early to mid-2010s — an excess of invoices that take too long to process, often up to 25 days. What’s more, the cost of processing them is simply too high, as much as $30/invoice, in some instances.

While Oracle Payables does automate some AP processes, the sheer volume of manual and non-PO invoices that organizations have to deal with means that humans are still required to do the lion’s share of the work. Consider a scenario where a supplier sends multiple invoices at once. Before these can be scanned and processed, the AP team (or their scanning partner) must undertake the cumbersome task of inserting blank separation pages between the invoices so the platform knows to classify them separately, or spend time stripping out cover letters and other non-essential pages that are likely to cause confusion.

The prevalence of these types of unstructured invoices generates a high level of exceptions, necessitating human intervention before they can be approved. Not only is this boring and time-consuming for AP teams, it’s also prone to error.

Unlocking value with AI-based AP solutions

At AppZen, we have developed the Autonomous Finance Index, which measures the level of autonomy adopted by an AP organization. Level 0 is a totally manual process while Level 5 is an AP process that runs itself. In practice, most AP teams lie somewhere in between Levels 1 and 3. Typical Oracle Payables users are likely to find themselves at the lower end of the scale, with Oracle and partner solutions taking care of somewhere between 20% and 40% of their AP processes, while humans manage the rest. To get maximum value from their Oracle deployments, they need to find a way to move up a level, to a point where automation tools handle  80% of all tasks with no human intervention at all.

With AppZen’s AI-driven Autonomous AP, Oracle users can make this leap.

A game-changer for Oracle Payables customers

By adding AppZen Autonomous AP, organizations can supercharge their Oracle deployments and solve the lingering problem of invoices that take too long and cost too much to process. Autonomous AP  can extract, understand, and process around 80% of an organization’s manual invoices with absolutely no help required from any humans, who are then freed up to work on more strategic tasks, such as business resilience and cash forecasting. The time it takes to process an invoice is cut to under a day and costs are reduced by 80%.

But the benefits don’t stop there. AppZen offers 100% guaranteed extraction accuracy by using AI-based, cross-customer and cross-supplier models that are already pre-trained on 60 million+ invoices and expense receipts. Oracle customers also do not have to spend time building and maintaining OCR templates. And, AppZen’s AI can even find duplicates across all your spend-Invoices, P-cards, and T&E in under 30 minutes.

These benefits and more demonstrate how Oracle and AppZen work better together.

To find out more on how AppZen AP automation can accelerate the digital transformation plans for Oracle customers, check out our recent webinar.