Beyond the Ledger: Navigating A Modern AP Automation Landscape

By: RPI Tech Connect   March 13, 2024

The world of accounts payable (AP) automation is dynamic. And the evolution of financial processes over the last several years has been incredible. But are organizations taking advantage of all that a modern AP solution has to offer?

Join experts Sherri Nettles and Mason Auch, as they explain the transformative journey of AP automation, from its manual roots a decade ago, to the cutting-edge solutions available today. Mason sheds light on the enhancements and quality-of-life improvements that modern AP automation brings in a business sense while Sherri provides a glimpse into the past, highlighting the stark contrast in the AP landscape.

Listen in as we explore the evolution of AP automation, and explain how modern solutions like Yoga Flexible Software, can help your business.

Interested in listening to this episode on another streaming platform? Check out our directories.

Meet Today’s Guest, Sherri Nettles

Sherri Nettles, a certified Infor Financials consultant, has worked on Infor/Lawson implementation and post-implementation support projects for over twenty-five years. She has extensive experience in the implementation of Infor/Lawson’s Financials Suite, with particular emphasis on General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Invoice Matching, Asset Management and Project and Activity Accounting. Her background encompasses years of experience in finance and the development, improvement, and implementation of financial system software.

Since 1996, she has worked on many Infor/Lawson implementations in a wide variety of industries including healthcare, public sector, telecommunications, manufacturing, financial services, and retail. Her responsibilities have included project management, identification of business requirements, system design and configuration, data conversion, interface design, training, testing, documenting, reporting, and post-live support. She also specializes in Infor/Lawson system assessments by interviewing the client, studying their system setup and internal processes, and making improvement recommendations based on industry leading practices.

Meet Today’s Guest, Mason Auch

Mason Auch, a driven and knowledgeable consultant at RPI, graduated in 2019 with a B.S. in Business and Management Systems and a minor in Data Analytics and Project Management. Joining RPI as a Business Analyst, he swiftly climbed to Senior Consultant, setting a record in the company’s history.

In three years, Mason has led numerous client engagements, specializing in AP automation. He manages RPI’s internal Dev Ops team, overseeing the development of the Yoga Flexible Software suite. His skills include SQL/Teradata, VBA, Python, C++, and Java, with proficiency in reporting tools like PowerBI and Spotfire.

Meet Your Host, Chris Arey

Chris Arey is an experienced B2B marketing professional with nearly a decade of working in content creation, copywriting, SEO, website architecture, corporate branding, and social media. Beginning his career as an analyst before making a lateral move into marketing, he combines analytical thinking with creative flair—two fundamental principles required in marketing.

With a Bachelor’s degree in English and certifications from the Digital Marketing Institute and HubSpot, Chris has spearheaded impactful content marketing initiatives, participated in corporate re-branding efforts, and collaborated with celebrity influencers. He has also worked with award-winning PR professionals to create unique, compelling campaigns that drove brand recognition and revenue growth for his previous employers.

Chris’ versatility is highlighted by his experience working across different industries, including HR, Tech, SaaS, and Consulting.

About RPI Tech Connect

RPI Tech Connect is the go-to podcast for catching up on the dynamic world of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). Join us as we discuss the future of ERPs, covering everything from best practices and organizational change to seamless cloud migration and optimizing applications. Plus, we’ll share predictions and insights of what to expect in the future world of ERPs.

RPI Tech Connect delivers relevant, valuable information in a digestible format. Through candid, genuine conversations and stories from the world of consulting, we aim to provide actionable steps to help you elevate your organization’s ERP. Whether you’re a seasoned professional or new to the ERP scene, our podcast ensures you’re well-equipped for success.

Tune in as we explore tips and tricks in the field of ERP consulting each week and subscribe to RPI Tech Connect below.

Transcript

Chris (00:00)
AP automation is not a new concept, but are organizations taking advantage of the functionality a modern application can provide? Stick around to find out how the accounts payable landscape has evolved over time and what businesses can expect to see in solutions on the market today.

Chris (00:02)
Hello, and thanks for tuning into RPI Tech Connect. I’m your host, Chris Airy. Today, we’re joined by some of RPI’s most talented, Sherry Nettles and Mason Auk. Sherry is a principal financial consultant, and Mason is RPI’s yoga product manager. Guys, welcome to the show.

Sherri Nettles (00:20)
Thanks Chris, thanks for having us.

Mason Auch (00:22)
Thank you very much.

Chris (00:22)
Yeah, very, very glad to have both of you. If you wouldn’t mind, Sherry, we’ll start with you. Could you tell the audience a little bit about yourself?

Sherri Nettles (00:30)
Sure can. So I’ve been in the loss and enforce space for about 26 years now. I’ve been working with RPI for about 20 years and really enjoying implementing Infor Cloud Suite, as well as our yoga products along with Mason. We’ve worked on a lot of projects together, and we’re really excited to bring you this content today.

Chris (00:52)
Awesome, and Mason?

Mason Auch (00:54)
Hi everyone, my name is Mason Auk. I’m our Yoga product manager. So my role here is to listen to both our clients and our consultants feedback on our product lines and get those new features or things along those lines developed and delivered to our team. So before that I was a consultant. So I worked in the AP automation space, consulting and advising on plethora of software on how to do AP automation.

Chris (01:19)
Excellent. Well, the two of you should make for a great discussion today. Our topic is something very popular. It is AP automation that is accounts payable. And, you know, I think the meat of today’s episode is to kind of look at AP in a greater context, you know, what a modern solution looks like today, how we got there, how things have evolved over time.

and just kind of sharing some insight into what organizations can expect out of a modern AP solution today. So Mason, if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to start with you. Tell us man, what’s going on in the AP automation landscape?

Mason Auch (02:01)
So much Chris, I mean, a lot has changed over the last few years, especially both around the ERP systems that we’re working with, and also in the OCR and everyone’s favorite buzzword AI space as well. So in the ERP space, if we take a look back with our InfoR Lawson clients about 10 years ago, when we’re talking about AP automation, what this really meant was that we had to have some sort of a system that could both do our invoice approvals.

and also our document storage for those invoices. So a lot of our clients were having to employ additional pieces of software with their current solutions to be able to support and handle that type of stuff. Within the last few years, Inform made great strides. They released a product called APIA, which was still designed to work with version 10. And it could do that invoice approval side at least. So at that point, we were still able to do our approvals and both our

version 10 AP processing in the Infor application. But at that point, we still had to have a document repository. So we were still having to tack on another piece of software. But now when we talk about our Infor Cloud Suite clients, those that have Infor FSM, a lot of that’s now included with it. So they’ve taken that invoice approval process from APIAA. They’ve put that into the application. They now support being able to put documentation and

additional documentation with Infor document management. So really when we talk about the ERP space, Infor’s brought more and more of these items in-house and it’s not just them. We can look across the entire space at Workday, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics, all of these ERP solutions are doing that. They’re bringing these document repos and things along those lines into their ERPs. At the same time, we look at the OCR and the AI space.

So if we look back 10 years ago, we were looking at basic extraction. It would be better if we did models. So that’s where you’d go through and you’d say, all right, for this McKesson vendor or this other vendor, we’re going to go through and we’re going to hard code and kind of tell it where the invoice number is, tell it where the invoice amount is. We’d go through and train that. But really, that became kind of a very specialized IT role.

you know, took a lot of time and maintenance to actually get good extraction with. And now we look at a lot of the stuff that we’re doing and, you know, the elements where we’re doing this contextual extraction, where I want to know where this invoice number is, and it can be anywhere and everywhere on one page or 15 pages. Right. This contextual extraction has gone through the roof with the accuracy on it and how quickly it can pick this type of stuff up. And then we pair that with, you know,

great advancements with the OCR space. I mean, talking about handwriting, you know, five years ago, no one was able to do good handwriting extraction. At this point, I mean, I’ve seen handwriting extraction where I can’t figure out the letters and the numbers, but it’s getting it right. So, I mean, it’s it has been completely changed in that entire space. So, I mean, we have great advances within our ERPs that we’ve seen with a lot of tech consolidation into one area. And then

Chris (05:11)
Nice.

Mason Auch (05:23)
On the other side of the house, we’ve seen insane growth with contextual extraction and the accuracy of extraction as well.

Chris (05:30)
You can imagine that with those improvements that people are seeing a lot of quality in life improvements, less time spent having to review things. It’s just, am I right about that? Is it kind of?

Mason Auch (05:42)
100% right, we’re seeing way better extraction for our end users, for those AP users. And then we’re also seeing such a decrease in the technical elements of doing those models and that technical maintenance area, which, you know, a lot of times when we do these projects that we would do these projects and for the first year or two, they would have great extraction. And then that IT resource would leave and now no one’s maintaining those models or doing anything along those lines. And we see, you know, straight through an accuracy go down.

over time and that’s just not very much the case anymore.

Chris (06:15)
Nice. So a lot of benefits on the table then for a modern solution. It’s great to hear that the Infor is also making improvements too. But I’m curious though, you know, this stuff didn’t happen overnight. As you said, a lot of developments have happened in the last couple of years, but Sherry, I know that you’ve been in the, in this space for a long time. So I’m curious from, from your perspective, what was, you know, the accounts payable process like, you know, 10 years, 10, 15 years ago.

Sherri Nettles (06:43)
That is a great question. And I actually kind of laugh out loud about how terrible it was. So I have fond memories as a financial analyst myself, years and years ago when I first got out of college, literally diving into file cabinets to pull manual pieces of paper out when a department head of a hospital would ask me who signed an invoice. I would literally have to go physically pull a piece of paper out of a file cabinet drawer. And that was if you were fortunate enough to actually find the piece of paper.

if it was filed correctly alphabetically or however the things were filed. So the evolution of accounts payable processing in my career has been just unbelievable and incomprehensible almost to me. So, um, things going really from the stone ages of paper in a file cabinet and having to at year end box all that stuff up and pay to store all of those paper documents at an offsite facility that costs a fortune to do.

We now have the ability to not only scan, image, store, and data capture information off those documents, but we now don’t have to store any of that paper any place, and it completely removes paper from our entire work environment, which is very, very cool to see because…

across my career, I’ve seen there are still, I still have seen customers that are kind of buried alive with paper, which is somewhat unusual these days, but it still exists. But people are moving, like Mason said, to some other imaging solutions, potentially some data capture solutions. But maybe some aren’t as robust as yoga. And I have to say, the yoga data capture accuracy rate and the tool itself is the best I’ve ever seen in my career.

the best I’ve ever worked with in my career and the best I’ve ever implemented for my customers. And I truly have enjoyed working with Mason and his team. We have our own developers that develop and write all of these enhancements that we identify on our projects with our customers, which is really, really cool, because I do implement with a lot of third-party solutions, but they are other companies. So the neat part about, for me anyway, implementing yoga…

is it is an RPI-owned tool and product, and the developers are RPI employees. So what’s neat to me is when we see enhancements that are needed, we get to go to Mason and say, hey, Mason, can we get this on the docket of things to improve? And that, to me, is huge for our customers and huge for our product development. So the landscape’s been really neat. It’s been super cool for me to see across the span of my career, for sure.

to go from such a manual environment to such a super, super automated environment. It’s been really cool.

Chris (09:32)
Thank you, Sherry. I appreciate the little history lesson there. It is cool to see where we are today. You mentioned some things there that Mason, I think you would probably be the best person to speak to, but with all these advancements and new functionality, what are the kind of benefits that organizations can see with a modern AP automation solution?

Mason Auch (09:53)
So a lot of these advancements that we talk about seems cool on paper, right? But what does that actually mean when we apply it to a business sense, right? So what does better extraction actually mean? Okay, yeah, maybe a team member doesn’t have to touch it, right? Or, oh, yeah, you know, we don’t have to fix that one field when we touch that invoice, right? But really what this means is as we continually advance this and as we get better extraction and things along those lines,

it also means that we’re getting better data into our system quicker. So what that means is like a lot of these API automation tools, when we go through and we do extraction and things along those lines, we couldn’t do accrual reports outside of, outside of Infor, right? Because we may have extracted an invoice that was a thousand dollars, but we read it as a million dollars, right? So obviously we minor detail, right? So, so obviously that would cause issues with our accrual reports.

Chris (10:44)
Minor detail, sorry.

Mason Auch (10:51)
So these advancements that we’re seeing here is actually allowing us to then extend our reporting up the pipeline, right? So instead of just getting the advantage to being able to accrual reports in Infor, right? Now we can do accrual reports up into our data capture, right? Now we can do user productivity stats up into our data capture, right? Things along those lines, the reporting, the insights that we have of our records prior to integration into the ERP

really been quite blown up in the space, right? Because we can now do all of this because we have accurate data, and then we’re just cleaning up what we can. And then the really, really critical thing that we’re seeing across the space is that integration and how we integrate within ERP is becoming kind of that next frontier, right? So we can spend all day long on going through and making sure we have the best extraction.

Make sure that we have AI that’s coming through and helping fill out information so our AP processes aren’t having to touch it as much in that AP automation tool. But the second that we ship that into the ERP, into Infor, if we’re not cognizant of what that looks like, the AP team is going to have to touch it again, right? And that just gets rid of the entire point of spending all of that time. Or let’s say, for example, we have a business rule on a certain vendor class, right?

So if it’s a utility vendor class, we want to require an additional field or something along those lines. If we’re not being cognizant of that in the OCR tool, then when we ship it into Infor or ship it into our next ARP, the AP team’s got to touch it again. And I think that’s where we’re seeing a lot of these next level changes on the AP automation front, is that we are bringing these requirements of the AP processors up into the OCR solution.

and then making a seamless integration into it.

Chris (12:49)
So what I’m hearing you say then is that the integration is just as important as the functionality in the solution itself, yeah? Because without it you’re… Go ahead.

Mason Auch (12:56)
Yeah, most of the, yeah, AP automation is supposed to reduce touches, right? So we can spend all day long reducing the touches on getting the data extracted, but if you’re having to touch it when it comes into the solution, then have we achieved anything with the AP automation? Ha ha ha!

Chris (13:13)
That’s a great point you’re making there.

Mason Auch (13:16)
And I think, you know, I’ve worked with Sherry on a lot of these different projects, right? And we’ve seen that as a major pain point. We had a client back in the Northeast Medical Center that was doing an ECM integration, and we were pushing documents from that ECM out into Infor. But what was happening was that, you know, the AP team was having to touch it again, right? So not only were they having to work at it once in the OCR side, then they were pushing it in.

and then they were still having to touch again an info, and if it aired out, then they were having to go find it another interface table. So it just became kind of a nightmare. It was just almost like we were shuffling invoices around underneath the cups being like, oh, we don’t know where they’re gonna be, right? So, you know, these integration points are really part of that transparency of providing that and not making sure that we’re parking stuff in interface tables. I know, Sherry, you can probably add a little bit more additional information there from an AP site too.

Sherri Nettles (14:13)
Oh my gosh, Mason, you just hit the nail on the head. Where is the invoice under the three cups? Like that is the magic question, right? That is such a great analogy. And that’s a big struggle for a lot of my customers across a lot of years that I’ve been in the industry now is that’s a big problem, right? If we can’t pay our vendors within our discount terms, that’s our big goal here too, right? Is to realize our vendor discounts. So if we can’t get a payment out the door within a 210.30 discount.

we’re losing so much money for our organization. And in today’s economy, we need to hang on to every dollar we can keep. So that’s our bottom line too is we got to get our payments out fast. So to do that, we’ve got to keep our eye on the prize and know where invoices are at all times. So what’s neat is with these automation solutions, we have our eye on those invoices at all times. There’s never a mystery about where your invoices are. So if they are in a yoga content queue,

We know that they’re in a yoga content queue. If they are not there, they’re in Infor. There’s no other place for them to be. There’s no interface for them to fail. There’s no interface used at all in the solution, which is hugely beneficial and important. We know where those invoices are. And the approval process I wanted to hit on to in Infor is quite beautiful and robust, and also highly visible to the end user and to your approvers.

So they have beautiful flowcharting within the application that shows you where those invoices are at all times in the approval process. So if something is not in a paid status or a release status, you can see exactly who that invoice is sitting with. And as Mason mentioned earlier, we can also get some incredible accrual reporting that we didn’t even have before. So we didn’t even have visibility in the olden days. I’ll use that term. We didn’t even have visibility into what’s not in the system.

because we had paper all over the place. And how do you account for, we used to call it back in the day, the desk audit where you’d have to run around the people’s desks and do an adding machine tape, I kid you not, of the addition of all the invoices in total that are on someone’s desk that we’d have to accrue for. Well, now with all these advanced solutions and yoga, we can just look up, we don’t even have to do any adding because Mason and his team have created lovely reports.

that do an accrual report for us of what’s in the application. So this is all just so, so useful at month end because there’s no guessing, there’s no manual work, there’s no adding machine tapes. It’s just, it’s incredible.

Chris (16:52)
Awesome, Sherry. Thank you. And you kind of alluded there to the secret sauce of today’s episode, which is RPI consultants, yoga flexible software. Mason, it sounds like, you know, all these modern functionality and quality in life improvements that we’ve been talking about in the AP automation landscape. These are things that, you know, individuals can expect to experience with yoga. Is that right?

Mason Auch (17:18)
Most definitely. Everything that we’ve talked about should be the questions that you’re asking if you’re going out looking for different AP automation solutions, right? The self-learning elements of it, making sure that it actually is managed and things along those lines. When we talk specifically about the yoga side, where our approach came is that we were consultants first and then developers second. So we came in this from a perspective of…

what are the needs that our clients have? And then we addressed those with business sense and then had our development team come in underneath us. So a lot of these features and functionalities that we’ve seen, Sherry’s been an absolutely influential person, but we’ve gathered data from all of our financial consultants and from many clients that we’ve done AP automation projects in the past with. We took all of that data that we had available to us to design and build this from the ground up.

not utilizing any preconceived notions or anything along those lines. This was very much a consultant and consumer driven.

Chris (18:26)
So yoga was built with the end user in mind. Yeah. Awesome.

Mason Auch (18:30)
100% so that’s so those interfaces is something that we spent a lot of time on making sure that you know these do interface in properly they don’t go into an interface table or anything along those lines so pretty much like Sherry said right there’s essentially three spots of our invoice it’s either in yoga being worked by the team it’s either in for out for approval or awaiting a match or it’s paid and it’s just.

three big buckets that are very clean and very quickly to be able to look through and find those invoices and not having to also go to interface tables and dig through those or anything along with them.

Chris (19:10)
Excellent. Thanks for clarifying that for us, Mason. We are approaching the end of today’s session, but before we wrap up, I’d like to ask a question to the both of you. I assume that maybe you’ll have similar answers to it, but given your different background and perspective, it’ll be interesting to see. And that question is this, if you could offer today’s audience one piece of advice regarding AP automation, what would it be?

And Sherry, we can start with you.

Sherri Nettles (19:43)
I think you know what my answer is going to be. But I’m a little bit biased, but I would definitely say, taking the bias out of it, I would say definitely for your organization, if you have not considered a full-on AP automation solution, you absolutely should be. And I would hope and pray that you would consider yoga and RPI consultants as your implementers, because we just have such breadth and depth of background, and we would love to help your organization.

automate your AP department and your entire procurement process. So you can get all those discounts. It really sells itself. When you do the math on how much money you can save your organization just by getting your payments made efficiently, it’s really a no-brainer. So that’s my recommendation. Mason, how about you?

Mason Auch (20:34)
I mean, my recommendation goes back to, you know, asking the right questions, right? Every time that you guys have to touch an invoice, every time that, you know, you guys have to look at something again, it doesn’t matter how amazing the technology is, right? If you as a person is having to touch it again, you as a person is having to go and review it again, that’s stopping you from doing what you’re, what we should be focusing on, which is those value add tasks, right?

you know, getting out and actually reviewing those statements, right? That’s like a number one thing that I always talk with clients about. It’s like, does how many, how much time do you guys actually spend reviewing your statements, being proactive when it comes to invoicing and even those with AP automation solutions, a lot of times still can’t be proactive because they’re still trying to chase down invoices that are underneath one of those cups. So that that’s always my big piece of advice.

Sherri Nettles (21:22)
Thank you.

Chris (21:25)
This is good advice, Mason. Seriously, folks need to know where their stuff’s at. Well, thank you both so much for your time today. This has been an awesome conversation for those tuning in. I hope you found this valuable if you’re looking for new API automation solutions. RPI Consultants is a company that can help you with that. If you have a question about today’s episode or would like to know more about API automation or how RPI can help, we invite you to contact us at podcast.

at rpic.com again that that’s podcast at rpic.com thanks so much for joining us and we’ll see you next time

Mason Auch (22:06)
Thank you guys.

Sherri Nettles (22:07)
Thanks, team.