Q3 2023 Product Releases: Boost your team’s productivity Vic.ai’s end-to-end autonomous accounts payable solution

In a perfect world, optimization is about making the most efficient use of time and resources. In reality, optimization is about making tradeoffs. As a CFO, you’re weighing questions such as: 

• Do I free up my team’s time by speeding up a process at the risk of more errors and mistakes?
• Do I pay invoices early to benefit from early discounts or do I hang onto my cash longer to benefit from additional annualized interest? 
• Is it worth making a change and shaking up the status quo and dealing with the short-term pain of the transition?

Many of these challenges have the potential to be solved with AI. In particular, finance is an area where AI is well-positioned to address problems on the reactive side by relieving employees of manual, and error-prone tasks, as well as proactive opportunities with real-time predictive insights.  The potential for increased productivity is enticing; a recent Goldman Sachs report predicts that once broadly adopted, generative AI could increase global labor productivity by 1.5% annually. The combination of solving specific problems and supercharging productivity produces a compelling vision for CFOs. According to Gartner, 64% of CFOs anticipate that in the next six years, autonomous finance will become business as usual. 

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The future of finance is autonomous

At Vic.ai, our vision is to build out that path to autonomous finance for our customers and deliver on the promise of AI.

Today, we are excited to announce several releases that will take our customers several steps forward on this journey together:

• Vic.ai Payments: Our newest platform release completes our vision for end-to-end Accounts Payable (AP) processing and integrates payments directly into the Vic.ai platform
• AI evolution: We are expanding our scale and increasing accuracy with updates to our AI model
• Invoice processing precision: New feature enhancements further simplify invoice processing workflows, with updates to PO matching capabilities, improved tax and freight handling, and managing vendor payment terms.

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Improve cash efficiency with Vic.ai Payments

Our relentless focus on customers extends to our entire platform. A sought-after solution we’ve heard from our customers was the need for a single provider for the entire invoice workflow. In particular, they wanted a solution that not only autonomously ingested,  processed, and approved invoices, but also enabled one-click payments.

With Payments now natively integrated into Vic.ai’s autonomous finance platform, finance departments can now turn their Accounts Payable department into a profit center by streamlining their AP processing from invoice ingestion to payment. They can save time, take advantage of discounts, and reduce the risk of fraud.

Payments from Vic.ai offers a single, secure, workflow for all payments: check, ACH, virtual card, and international. This lets customers save time, and reduce the risk of errors by keeping all components of AP processing on a single system, mitigating fraud by shifting away from checks, and reducing transaction costs by leveraging more preferred payment methods.

To learn more about why we built Vic.ai Payments and how it works, check out our blog post.

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Increase the scale and accuracy of AP processing with our latest AI model

We are excited to announce enhancements to our AI model that will enable us to continue providing best-in-class predictions and autonomous invoice processing for our customers. These enhancements, combined with the depth of our financial training data, provide our customers with a unique mix of cutting-edge technology and reliable AP expertise.

We are making these enhancements for several reasons:

1. Focus on improvement: Using the latest AI technology in our models ensures that we stay at the cutting edge, delivering the most accurate and relevant predictions for our customers. 
2. Best-in-class learning: The continuous evolution of AI allows us to enhance the capabilities of our models, allowing us to go even deeper in our analysis of customer invoices and behavior.
3. Center on the customer: By leveraging the latest AI technology, we can continually improve user experiences, boost model performance, and adapt to emerging patterns and trends effectively.

The updates to our AI model reflect our dedication to providing our customers with the best in terms of tech and expertise.

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Work smarter with more precise predictions and increased contextual information 

In addition to our major platform updates, we are constantly looking for ways to improve. We’ve taken our customer feedback to heart and are excited to announce several recent releases, aimed at increasing the precision of our invoice processing capabilities, further streamlining the AP experience. 

In particular, our team has been focused on increasing the visibility of key information in our invoice processing UI. These enhancements include:

1. PO Matching mismatch handling: Our UI now displays the tolerance rules at the line item level. When there’s a mismatch, customers can easily understand why there’s a mismatch by viewing the violated rule.  In addition, we’ve enhanced our mismatch approval flows. Customers can now pre-define which variances are out of tolerance instead of having to manually check. Approval flows will also be pre-defined so that they are automatically sent to the correct approver.
2. Vendor payment terms: Vic.ai can now surface the vendor payment term information from their ERP directly into our UI. Customers can be certain that the payment terms are accurate and avoid verifying them, then manually make the decision to pay early and take advantage of discount terms. This feature can be enabled for organizations that have contracted payment terms with their vendors. For those that do not, our AI will continue to predict payment terms based on what is written on the invoice.
3. Tax handling: We now surface a prediction of the tax amount on the invoices and also a prediction of associated tax codes for each line. This allows our customers to confirm that a tax is accurately being tracked per line item and that the tax amount per invoice is properly calculated for payment. By setting tax codes to each invoice line using AI, the manual work of invoice processing is further reduced.
4. Freight handling: Line items for freight shipping can now be identified and automatically coded with the corresponding GL account for both PO and expensive invoices. This reduces the amount of manual work on behalf of our customers.

The increased precision from these enhancements further automates tedious steps in invoice processing, saving teams time and reducing the risk of errors. 

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Looking ahead

We're excited to continue this journey together and enable our customers to embrace the full advantages of AI-powered solutions. We look forward to their continued feedback and partnership in pushing the boundaries of what is possible within autonomous finance.

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