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Consultant billing template for organizations

[Music] hello and welcome to all our viewers on CFO insights I am Sheri a financial technology consultant at hyper Bots and I'm very excited to have John Nasi here with me who is an accomplished executive with expertise in AI machine learning and computer vision driving impactful Technology Solutions in education Healthcare and business business thank you so much for joining us today John to discuss the challenges of invoice template standardization and how AI might offer a solution let's dive right into the topic with our first question in your experience what are the primary challenges companies face when trying to standardize invoice templates across their operations the main issue is that the invoice is the representation of your transaction with that customer and just like there's every different type transaction in the world having to accurately represent that through a paper or a document um is complex and as diverse as the transactions are personalized invoices often create the similar complexity and how do vendors typically react to requests for invoice standardization and what impact does this have on the relationship between vendors and clients vendors usually want it to represent their point of view um so they'll usually want some customized language or or some format that represents their business model that creates complexity because it might just not be possible with the system they're using often times you're just like well this is what we can do and then you end up creating an addendum or some other side document which isn't ideal in any contract and from your perspective why do you think there hasn't been a universally accepted standard for invoices despite multiple initiatives like ubl and EDI yeah so that's kind of like one end of the spectrum to the other it's either the customer wants it to represent their transaction or are we going to align and kind of force all transactions to comply with the same transactional standard and within different Industries you can use EDI as an example if you're doing High transactions of certain products but um oftentimes again if you're trying to represent the unique nature of the transaction you're doing it just isn't applicable I think there could be interesting opportunities per industry and I have seen different standardization around um like e-commerce transactions or things that go through say QuickBooks or whatever the Erp system is but that's that's fairly generic and just isn't applicable to a lot of transactions that exist right and in the industry right now some businesses prefer detailed invoices While others prefer summary invoices so how does this preference diversity contribute to the failure of standardization efforts it it really comes down to what is the nature of the transaction that you're doing so if you have a complex multi-year transaction where there's a lot of details that go into figuring out that exact agreed to price um that can cause complexity in what might otherwise just be a simple line item in your transaction um also if there's contingencies or subcomponents that together they want to show how these subcomponents roll up to this overall product offering price it's just the nature of what you're trying to represent and sell if you don't do that if you don't represent what the customer wants again then you often end up with like the invoice just becomes a a oneline item or very overly simplified document and then you have the statement of work or the the agreement that is more of the details of what is actually you know the service order of what is actually being done that makes sense John and how do system interoperability issues contribute to the challenges of invoice standardization and what are the potential consequences for businesses well one of the main issues and using that same example that I just said if the actual transactional details of what your deal is going to be are not on the invoice Finance and Accounting might not be able to have the visibility to understand what that transaction was for or the if something changes or needs to be different which is represented in the service order that can create a situation where Finance or accounting just don't have visibility in the Erp system in the accounting you know accounts payable to be able to see what this change was for why it happened and then they have to go back to the service order back to the transactional detail details that are on a different document and try to understand what happened so the more that the invoice can be an accurate representation of the transaction it it just helps everybody and can you share some examples from what you have seen in the industry of par standardization initiatives and why they didn't achieve the desired outcomes sure um the main example that always pops out in my head in this when this topic comes up is um we were trying to create standardized invoices across a global company where we had merged together six or seven different entities have been acquired and we found that you know overall companies could have we got standardized structure and line items all figured out and everything was good come to find out that as an example in Japan the standard was that if you're going to have an invoice with an with a customer they have to pay it requires a physical signature and that was something we hadn't considered the needing to be able to physically sign the invoice before sending it in um we we were able to work around and find out way is to have a place where they could sign and print it out to be able to support their own need so we had a standardized process overall and then a option for how where a unique region needed a specific requirement how they were able to have their own exception but overall recognized that this process could be standardized globally with acknowledging localized exceptions and since everybody's talking about AI how do you see AI potentially solving the problem of invoice standardization by handling non-standard inputs um it really just enables you to be able to step away from the from the structured requirements so the invoices will still have their structured call it Baseline and there is different each company could have their own standard but when you receive it as a say an invoice or you receive a bill from a client the AI can enable you to read that and more accurately Pull It in so right now as an example you have to create new various standards based on individual vendors and in this case the AI can read it digest the information let you know if there's a something to review but more often than not capture all the variations without needing to force the inputs to be standardized and what advice would you give to CFOs or our viewers considering AI based solutions for handling non-standardized invoices in their organizations be patient um it it it's coming the technology is coming and it'll be here sooner than I think one of the challenges will be finding the right opportunity ities for the people who are currently manually doing a lot of that work because AI is going to automate a lot of it and make it a lot simpler you're asking advice to CFOs start looking who you're who who on that team you can help coach up and train to do other areas or more value add because um AI is going to be able to replace a lot of that manual workload that they're doing right now thank you so much for these insightful answers John it's clear that while standardization has its challenges AI offers a promising future to navigate these complexities [Music]