Q2 2024 Product Launch: Putting the Accountable in AI

Good data leads to good decisions. Unfortunately, that is not the reality in Accounts Payable (AP) today. According to Ardent Partners, 53 percent of AP professionals say they need to improve their reporting and analytics.

Having a direct line of sight into the AP process enables accountants and controllers to understand their workflows' efficiency and pinpoint bottlenecks by employees, approvers, or vendors. Being able to quickly audit invoices, or reconcile accruals at the end of the month is crucial to keeping track of expenses in their proper periods. 

This issue has a compounding effect for higher-ups like VPs of Accounting, CAOs, or CFOs. When there are gaps in financial data, it becomes challenging to get real-time information on cash flow. This is why nearly 40 percent of all CFOs don’t fully trust their financial data.  

At Vic.ai, we are a data-driven company and collaborate with our customers to create purpose-built analytics and reporting for improving AP workflows, reducing inefficiencies, and better cash flow forecasting.

Vic.ai is proud to introduce reimagined analytics packages to address the variety of customer use cases we’ve been solving: monitoring the Vic.ai platform, optimizing AP team and business performance, and providing proactive insights for off-platform improvements. In addition, we’ve invested in updates to our core platform user experience across PO Matching, Payments, and Approvals.

Making AI accountable with real-time insights

To support our customers' business both on and off the Vic.ai platform, there are three new analytics packages, tailored to solve different needs:

• Standard Analytics: Customers can see the impact of their Vic.ai implementation, starting at day one. This is included with their Vic.ai implementation.
• Advanced Analytics: AP Managers and Controllers can gain direct sight into their AP team performance, including invoice processing rates by team members, along with business metrics such as return on their Vic.ai investment.
• Premium Analytics: Get everything from the advanced package, plus insights to accelerate business performance and workflows, custom reports, and raw data files.

The reporting and dashboards included in each package can be used across the finance department to aid in decision-making and bookkeeping.

Standard Analytics

With our standard analytics package, which is included in a Vic.ai implementation, AP Managers and Controllers can review the AI’s accuracy rates, see the percentage of no-touch invoices, and view processing volume over time. This allows our customers to track AI learning and improvement over time and maximize their dashboard’s value with a detailed user guide on use cases and key questions. 

Advanced Analytics

For customers looking to make data-driven decisions about their AP team and business performance, or have specific auditing needs like accrual reporting, our advanced analytics package provides the additional layer of detail they require.

Common use cases include: 

• Understand AP team performance and remove bottlenecks: Managers can review and compare processing time by AP team members to see who may need additional coaching or help. 
• Streamline approvals: Managers can see how many invoices are still outstanding for approval and how long the approval has been pending. In addition, they can monitor how many approvals are pending and rejected per approver. This provides visibility into  who might be slowing down the process, or where approver may be identifying problems with the invoice or vendor.
• Vendor accuracy: Managers can check on Vendor accuracy by company and entity to understand where issues with invoices could also be slowing down the AP process. 
• Invoice auditing: Accountants can export reports such as accruals, payment reconciliation, and processed invoices to ensure all invoice spend is accurately reflected for month, quarter, and year close. 

In addition to supporting AP teams, there are several executive dashboards designed to help CFOs, COAs, and VPs of Accounting understand Vic.ai’s impact on their business. 

Common use cases include:

• Spend insights: CFOs can get a clear line of sight for payment activities and spend volume. They can track on-time payments, payment types, early payment discounts captured, and total savings. 
• AI Performance and Autopilot enablement: VPs can review the number of invoices processed that qualify for Autopilot in order to determine when to turn Autopilot on at organization or company levels. They can also see which invoices eligible for Autopilot had changes made to them so they can understand what needs to be addressed before turning it on for the company or organization.
• Return on investment: CFOs can track their ROI on Vic.ai across the length of their contract. They can also review overall AP efficiency with metrics such as processing time per invoice, invoice volume, and duplicate invoices detected.

Premium Analytics

For customers who have maximized their Vic.ai workflows and team performance and are now finding that they are plateauing, our premium analytics package provides the insights to unlock further efficiencies in AP workflow.

Common use cases include: 

• Eliminate bottlenecks in the AP process: Managers can get additional details to fine-tune AP team workflows by uncovering common manual interventions and invoice delays happening outside the platform. 
• Access to raw data: Managers can conduct their own analysis or merge Vic.ai data with internal data sets to answer specific business questions. 
• Custom reports: Managers can work with Vic.ai analytics team to develop reports covering edge cases unique to their business.

Enhanced UX for PO Matching and Payments

We are excited to not only provide our customers with more visibility into the Vic.ai platform through our refreshed analytics, but also with improvements to our user interface.

PO Matching

PO Matching was launched in 2023 to take a traditionally tedious, stare-and-compare process and automating it using our AI. Our latest updates are intended to speed up the process further, while improving the precision of the matches. 

• Prioritize approver’s time with a summary dashboard: Upon logging in, PO approvers will see a table of companies and the count of pending approvals so they can quickly review and resolve any mismatches outside of set tolerances.
• Increase the precision of PO Matching: The UI will now display 4 decimal places for quantity and unit price, instead of 2. This will reduce the instance of rounding errors that can impact match rates.

Payments

We’ve made several UI enhancements to make it easier for invoice processors to understand the full lifecycle of the invoice and created more filter options for payment initiators.

• Unified approval history view: Approvers can see payment history in the approval history to follow the full lifecycle of the invoice. While this information is available in the payment audit log today, including it in the approval history will make it easier for invoice approvers to track payments on behalf of their vendors
• Enhanced filtering capabilities: Focus payor time with more filters and the ability to save favorite filter combinations. Filter across bills vs. credits, date, payment method, account, bill total, currency, and early payment discounts.

Core platform

In addition to the updates to PO Matching and Payments, we have invested in UI and approval releases to increase processing speed. 

• Vendor tag filters: For organizations with hundreds of vendors added weekly, accountants need a way of filtering by the set of vendors assigned to each accountant. By adding the ability to filter by vendor tag, accountants can quickly find their respective invoices for processing and review. 
• Approvals: We continue to look for ways to improve the approver experience and remove bottlenecks to the approval process while also balancing controls. That is why we are updating our permissions so that admins have the choice to give invoice approvers only the ability to edit line item fields. By granting approvers the ability to edit only line item levels such as cost centers, they can address the issue without rejecting the invoice. At the same time, admins will be able to decide if approvers can edit just the line item or also the header-level information, maintaining the integrity of the process.

Looking ahead

We know our customers are data-driven, and we are excited to surface new insights so they can make more informed decisions on improving the AP process both on and off of the Vic.ai platform. These updates reflect our commitment to quality and innovation, designed to meet our customers’ evolving needs. For a deeper dive into these new capabilities and to see how they can benefit your work, check out our upcoming release webinar.