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Invoice ap for Management

hello and welcome my name is Jamal Caleb when I'm pleased to present today's webinar from invoice to payment digitizing and automating your ap process the presentation will last around 30 minutes with additional time for Q&A so I'd like to introduce our speakers today we have Michael 0 from concur and Byron Biggins from invoice Pei and they'll be sharing with us how enterprises are moving to paperless ap processes through intelligence driven automation well hi everyone this is Mike Zuber with SAT concur and I'll go ahead and kick things off here on talking about this from that from the concur standpoint with AP automation and so as you might imagine and we say if you concur speak with a lot of financial leaders and we also are referencing some survey information here from the i/o FM the Institute of Finance and management and to really kind of point to what's what's probably top of mind for anyone on the phone today or your you know financial leaders at your organization when it comes to you know what what is really you know what are they focused on and so this is a list of items here obviously there's you know improving efficiencies there's having access to analytics visibility into your liabilities etc the actual number one and number two items for financial leaders was ability to forecast and manage cash flow and improve their working capital and so we are very accustomed to helping organizations with leave all of these items through you know the technology that we provide to help automate accounts payable but really you know helping to enable those financial leaders to achieve their their you know top goals which is to better manage their spend their cash flows and really maximize and optimize their working capital and but there's a lot that stands in the way and you know it's it's for a good reason that this is that those are items that are top of mind and important for financial leaders because it's not easy to do and the reasons for that really are inherent in just how Accounts Payable works in most organizations today so if you look at any Accounts Payable department and across the board across the country companies of all sizes they're still reliant on processing paper for the vast majority of those invoices we have yet to truly transform you know the invoice process to a digital process between buyers and suppliers and so as a result suppliers are sending out invoices through the mail or through email and that it's the AP Department in the form of a paper invoice or a PDF that gets printed and as and that's sort of where the paper chase begins if you look at how long it takes most organizations to approve an invoice on average it's just over two weeks in many cases it's it's up to three weeks or more just to get that invoice routed for approval get it coated and get it entered into the financial system which for your financial leaders at your organization's that's that's really where they begin to see those liabilities and and that's you know two weeks into the process that really inhibits their ability to predict cash flow in the short to medium term and then as a result of this sort of manual paper-based process the payments of those invoices off often very reactive and paper intensive as well with nearly two-thirds of payments in North America so going out via paper check so when concurrence focusing on helping organizations to solve for these challenges it really starts from obviously the the technology piece of it through automating the process through eliminating the paper and expediting that process right getting those paper documents converted into digital invoices that can be routed for approval is critical and that's a service that we provide and the result of that is driving down the time it takes to approve an invoice and driving down the cost associated with getting those invoices reviewed approved and entered as well as helping to you know eliminate any duplicates or helping to identify exceptions etc by starting with that and putting by starting with putting automation in place and expediting that process it then enables increase in increased visibility for the organization so for example you know the CFO VP of Finance et cetera have visibility into those liabilities right away and you have your ap staff able to manage by exception and highlight those invoices that may be out of policy may have issues that need to be resolved etc so you become much more efficient strategic and proactive rather than reactive and this then lends itself to being able to go and get more strategic about when and how you make your payments and that's really where my my counterpart Byron Biggins will will pick up and talk about how invoice pay helps with that part of it as well but understanding that it's important to put in place the key fundamentals for AP automation to help enable that process downstream so the way that s ap concur approach is this is really looking at it in in these four different sort of buckets from helping organizations to better manage and control that spend before it occurs the sort of initiation of send all the way to at capturing those invoices we'll talk more about that the process how as invoices get coded routed approved and how that time is expedited and then connecting that information in with your core systems your financial system etc so taking a look at this first step this is an important part of it many organizations will have some type of a purchase order process in place for their cost of goods materials inventory etc but we oftentimes speak with organizations that have no process in place or are not enforcing a process to manage the spend that is more employee driven oftentimes those sort of overhead expenses that could could definitely have tighter controls over that spend so we provide an ability to give access your employees to create a requisition to indicate what is they're going to be purchasing from which supplier to generate a request that can be submitted and routed for approval giving approvers visibility into this before they approve it and actually being able to identify how this will impact their budgets before authorizing this spend and before a purchase order is generated and sent to the supplier now this is really helping to enable what is what is a important goal for most organizations which is to bring more spend under management by putting in place processes to get spend pre-authorized oftentimes you know this spend is not receiving the proper approvals ahead of time and is simply being invoiced and at that point you know that spend is already committed and and those payments need to be made by putting some processes in place that process really helps organizations to bring more of that spend under control and having real-time visibility into how and the purchase requests will impact their budget in the key way of doing that the next key aspect of this is as I mentioned earlier just simply eliminating that paper and converting those invoices into digital invoices within concur this is really where concur helps your organization by embedding best-in-class OCR or optical character recognition software to actually read the invoices that your suppliers are sending and parse those invoices and with intelligent algorithms to read in any format of invoice however the details are laid out on that invoice and read the important information and convert that into an electronic invoice or thanking Kerr and now many of our clients will will manage that scanning and verification process themselves but actually the majority of our clients will look to concur to be a fully outsourced service for that where we essentially provide a mail room for your accounts payable Department we received invoices through the mail through email through fax and we we manage the whole scanning and verification process so by the time once that invoice comes in it's loaded into the invoice approvers queue to move through your workflow when the key benefits of this is that once the invoice has been scanned into the system you now have visibility into those liabilities you know as soon as that invoice has been received and now helping to drive down the time it takes to approve that invoice one of the key ingredients to to this is is obviously user adoption so that you know your employees are able to access this whenever and wherever they are so mobile is a key component of that sa P concur provides a set of services you may have heard of concur for travel booking travel management as well as employee expense reporting those are key aspects of our our bar a platform as is the approval of invoices so by providing all of this through an easy-to-use app it means that it's accessible to your employees wherever whenever they are they need to do this and so they no longer are the bottleneck in that approval process and approvers can review and submit or approve invoices right from their smartphone even when they're out of the office on a business trip or even on vacation so once an invoice is submitted obviously your organization likely has you know important controls in place to ensure that the proper people are reviewing those invoices those workflows will be embedded into concur so that those invoices will be routed ingly automatically so whether it's a simple one up or whether there are additional approvers whether you have signing thresholds or whether you have a need to route based on a department or a project or whatever the case might be concur has the ability to support any and all workflow requirements to get those invoices approved in a timely manner and of course if you have purchase order related invoices because we're able to identify and match invoices to purchase orders and if there is a match we can just automatically route that for approval essentially straight through processing of that in place before that information can then be passed to your ERP allowing you to then go ahead and pay your vendors at the appropriate time as I mentioned and you know any time we're talking about purchase order related invoices it's important to be able to identify when and where you have discrepancies and the system is able to to identify those based on whatever criteria you want to identify an exception so if it's a unit price if it's quantities if it's whether those items have been received or not and concur can intelligently identify those and flag those discrepancies and based on our data we actually find that it's about 20% of the time that there would be an exception that requires any kind of review or exception handling and really it's you know 80% of the time those invoices are cleanly matched to the POA go straight on through for processing so this can help to expedite those approvals and really help your staff be more strategic about which invoices they are you know following up on to resolve exceptions and then lastly here before I hand the ball over to Byron is connecting in with your financial system so SJP concur has an open platform that allows to us to interact with any erps or whatever your ERP is and we're able to exchange data with that ERP and that's important obviously because this in many ways becomes kind of an extension of your core financial systems to help enable and drive efficiency in terms of getting that data in and out of that system so just to recap on that and to then kind of call out some of the key benefits of concurrent invoice solution this is based on surveying our invoice clients and IDC did a survey of this and found that for clients that are implementing fkp concurrent voice they're finding an annual benefit of over $15,000 per every thousand invoices process so roughly a savings of $15 per invoice simply due to efficiency gains etc by automating that process it's reducing the time it takes to approve an invoice from that average of over 14 days down to about four and a half days so significant reduction in the time it takes to approve those invoices and get those entered into the financial system we're providing an significant improvement in the visibility that the accounts payable Department and financial leaders and an organization have access to listens helping organizations better track their budgets enforce compliance manage benders and improving their their ability to forecast their cash flows and then lastly here and this is something that we feared time and time again is sort of a benefit that they were not necessarily focused on initially but have found that the increased satisfaction among the AAP staff is is a significant benefit to automating the accounts payable process allowing people in account able to be more efficient and then more strategic about how they're managing this process giving them time back from managing those manual data entry tasks align them to be more analytical leveraging the data becoming more proactive that helps with their satisfaction and helps with their career progression which is which is important especially when trying to reduce turnover in that department also having a benefit to vendors who are reliably paid on time with that I'll go ahead and hand the ball off to firing begins with invoice pay thanks Mike I really appreciate it so for those of you not familiar with and would pay yet we focus on the payment automation side of the AP process so we kind of pick up where concur leaves off which is why we are such good partners so I'm going to talk today about how ap payments have for a long time been very manual and inefficient primarily relying on paper and just like in our personal lives checks are the worst way to make payments because they're time-consuming expensive and inefficient so envoy's pay has created a better way to make AP payments and I'm going to show you a little bit about that today so there's usually a path that a company takes overtime with respect to how they handle AP payments and they usually start with this very manual check driven process and then they'll start doing a few electronic payments based on request from their supplier so usually this compliers will request they receive money by ACH and then at some point they'll get more serious about electronic payments and usually they do this by starting to work with their bank to pay a greater percentage of their suppliers by ACH or virtual credit card but this often creates more work for an AP department as now they'll have a separate workflow for each of the payment types and they need to manage and update their suppliers payment data they need to handle time-consuming payment exceptions that come with electronic payments so we really help companies to get where they would like to be where they have a single workflow for all of their payments using the optimal payment type for each supplier without having to collect and update the suppliers payment information themselves or take care of those payment exceptions so the question is you know why are so many companies still paying suppliers by cheque and the answer is that there's a few barriers that prevent them from easily paying suppliers electronically so here's some of the common ones the first is it and usually when they want to start making electronic payments through their bank they have to format a payment file to the bank specifications and typically it doesn't match what they can generate out of there ERP or accounting system so they need to get IT resources involved to get the file into the right format and the AP team just typically doesn't have access to those IT resources the next thing is that every electronic payment requires coordination between the companies sending money and the company receiving money so for business payments you need to know what payment types being used where to send the funds and how to deliver the remittance on that to coincide with the payment and then probably one of the biggest is it becomes a major effort to manually update that supplier data in your ERP so we see we've got a giant network of suppliers we pay every month I think it's over 400,000 and what we see is every month about 89% of our supplier data stay static but 11% changing so that's new suppliers being added changes in the suppliers banking information and contact information or payment type that's letter wants to accept so having to manually update that information in an ERP can be very painful and time-consuming for AP teams especially when they have lots of suppliers when they have hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of suppliers and then lastly I talked a little bit before in the previous slide that when you're doing all checks you just have one process but once you introduce ACH and virtual card and paying international suppliers now you have a bunch of different processes and so it actually decreases efficiency and sort of increases it so electronic payments are great for decreasing cost but you want to be able to decrease cost while increasing efficiency at the same time in the reality is that ap teams are just bogged down by an avalanche of activity I'm guessing a few of these things probably look familiar to your AP team and working harder or throwing more people the problem doesn't really help so let me talk about how we help them move to where they want to be so it means that we give them a single workflow for all payments regardless of payment types we give them a range we give we give their suppliers a range of payment options without the apt meeting coordinate with the suppliers themselves it means they no longer have to follow up on unclear payments it means they no longer have to worry about payment fraud and it doesn't require them to spend IT resources to ship to electronic payments so let me walk you through how our solution works so the customer would choose the invoices they want to pay in their ERP or in concur send us a file and that file can come to us we have different customers sending us file in different ways so it can come to us via API it can come to us via a secure FTP or they could just save the file and upload it in our user interface but in one way or another we get a file of the payments that they want to make and then we at the time we get the file we optimize the payment type for that payment to supplier so we scan to see which suppliers are being paid and then you use the payment type that's best for that supplier because we will have reached out to every supplier to find out what payment types they will accept and collect the information we need to execute those payments for our customers so we optimize the payment type for each transaction and then our customer has the ability to stop hold or approve each payment or the entire batch of payment so similar to as Mike described would concur we have rules and thresholds around the approval workflow as well so the invoice would have already been approved and concur but now the payment can be approved in n with pay and has a workflow for that specifically and in most organizations is a different person that's approving the invoice and approving the payment so you can think of this as the equivalent of signing a check before it leaves the building and we can as I said we can say payments under five thousand don't need approval payments above five thousand need one approver or payments above fifty thousand need two approvers payment to this supplier never needs approval payment to that supplier always does - all of that is very flexible and customizable in our solution and once the payment is approved we pull funds from our customers account and push it directly out to their suppliers the same day we get the funds so we don't sit on the funds we grab them and push them out using the payment types that's best for our customer and then we follow up on any type of payment issues or questions so if there's a credit card a virtual card that hasn't processed we call this plan find out why there's a check that hasn't cleared we follow up with the supplier if there's any error on an ACH we get that resolved we actually assume liability for the payment for our customers which is something nobody else in the industry does that I'm aware of and indemnify the customer so if anything goes wrong it's on us and then if there's any payment questions coming from the suppliers those are directed to us it's our email and phone number on the remittance and so we take charge of that for our customers and then we push a return file back either into we can push it into concur or into the ERP to once the payment is executed indicating which payment type was used and when the payment cleared so let me dive into a few of the reasons specifically that our customers choose and would pay so a few of the things here are that and let me start with our customers are typically a large enterprise or upper-mid market company company is making lots of payments that that tends to be where we work with most customers and we don't ask these customers to adapt the way they work we instead we provide a very flexible customizable solution that meets our customers needs so you can see a few of the features here but we can handle things across multiple locations multiple bank accounts multiple reporting hierarchies multiple countries multiple currencies things like that one of the biggest barriers for AP Department to transition from paper checks electronic electronic payments is that coordination between the payer and the recipient so I talked before about you have to know what payment types being use and where to send the funds where to deliver the remittance and most AP departments just don't have the time and resources to collect this information and on top of that the information changes all the time as I mentioned before so n which they already has a very large network of existing suppliers which means that we can already pay many of your suppliers electronically but for any suppliers that are not in our network we will reach out to find out what payment types they will accept and use the payment type that's best for you and we we do this both upfront when we start working with the new customer and overtime every time my customer adds a new supplier get them set up right away for electronic payment so they're not having to send any checks and we maintain update this for our customers dynamically and one of the reasons that many companies decide to use electronic payments is that their suppliers ask them to do so because a our departments don't like paper checks anymore than ap departments do so suppliers really like getting paid by and would pay because we provide payment options detailed remittances visibility on payments to our supplier portal and we have a supplier facing support team so we have both the customer support team and a supplier sport team and then lastly most companies prefer electronic payments over cheque but there's those barriers that make it challenging to do electronic payments as I talked about before so we realize it needs to be really easy to make this transition so we go out of our way to make it quick and simple for our customers get started we do the heavy lifting on that supplier enablement coordination and allow them to get up and running without doing an IT project we also I mentioned before ap teams off and out of limited IT resources to do the the payment file specifications we can use any file format that a company can spit out of there ERP or we can use a file coming from Kerr and and we don't we don't do long term contracts and despite this the fact we have over ninety nine percent retention rate of customers so there are several people within an organization that benefit from a better ap payment solution so here are some examples and as I mentioned before check payments are expensive so when you take into account check stock envelope stamps toner or positive pay and labor the cost of sending a check is often five dollars or more in contrast we charge ninety cents plus postage for each check we send for our customers but more importantly we will move most of their payments to electronic payments which are a fraction of the cost of checks in fact we also pay our customers a rebate for each virtual credit card transaction and those rebates more than pay for the cost of our solution for every single one of our customers so in addition to all of the efficiencies they gain from our solution it generates a new line of revenue for the AP Department so being a payment solution security is a top priority that part isn't necessarily unique to n which pay but is what is unique I mentioned before is that we assume all liability for the payment and indemnify the customer so if there's ever any payment fraud that is on us and then I think it's important to explain a little bit about how we think about business so a few things I'll point out here is we don't make customers commit to long term contracts we want to earn their business as the business changes our solution is dynamics that we can meet needs for the long term and then we care just about as much about your suppliers as you do because in our business model if we don't keep both customers and suppliers happy our business doesn't succeed so let me just end with a few staff here about invoice pay so the company was launched back in 2009 so we've been doing this for a little over ten years now we have over 400 customers as a measurement for our retention rate is over 99% I think we've lost maybe less than five customers over the course of our existence over ten years and we take care of a hundred percent of our customers payments and of those payments 82% are by card and eight last year we grew by a little over a hundred percent and our supplier network is over four hundred thousand so if you have any questions I'm going to wrap up here but if you have any questions feel free to type them in the chat box and and we can leave a few minutes for questions here after this last slide so just to summarize about and would say we simplify the AP payment process we make it a single workflow for all ap payments it's increased efficiency with reduced errors it's the financial results we provide through the cost savings of moving from cheque to electronic payments and then the cash rebate on those virtual card transactions and we reduce our customers risk by making sure they don't have to capture and store the Spyders banking data and then also assuming liability for the payment and then it also creates better supplier relationships because the suppliers now get a range of payment options with details remittances and we have this fire portal for increased visibility and our supplier facing score team and if you have additional questions after the webinar you can feel free to reach out to myself or Mike at concur and we'd be happy to get those answered for you