Accounts Payable Content

AP Automation is getting a lot of attention recently from multiple angles. This includes both finance/procurement organizations considering these solutions independently or as a component of broader invoice-to-pay or procure-to-pay investments. And it also counts the investment community, which continues to throw support behind a broad range of providers (just recently MineralTree raising $50 million).

As we’ve noted before, from a breadth perspective, AP automation technology can encompass the following functional areas on the highest level, which include electronic invoice capture, paper/PDF invoice capture (scan/capture), core invoice processing, invoice validations/matching (e.g., match to a PO or goods receipt), invoice approvals, supplier portal, supplier enablement services, systems integration, pre-onboarded suppliers payment integration and payment.

As part of our continuing coverage of AP automation, this Spend Matters PRO series will explore the functional requirements that finance and procurement organizations should look for in a solution with “foundational” and “advanced” capabilities.

Part 1 takes our first look at the core invoicing requirements for AP automation and some of the criteria that Global 2000 and middle market organizations should consider when selecting solutions (i.e., invoicing set-up, paper scan/capture support and e-invoicing). Subsequent briefs in this series will analyze other AP automation requirements that customers should look for in a solution.

As our journey to world-class e-invoicing continues in this multi-part Spend Matters Plus research brief, we discuss five additional elements to diagnose the overall scope, capability and coverage of your e-invoicing deployment — and whether or not your solution provider(s) can enable you to get to world-class levels of performance. If you want to catch up on this series, we encourage you to learn about all the components of the first five elements (invoice capture, collaboration/workflow, matching, compliance/validations and mobile enablement) and a broader introduction to the topic in first installment of this series. Finally, we invite Spend Matters practitioner and consulting advisory clients to reach out to us to discuss their existing and planned deployments. E-invoicing is far more complex a solution area to analyze than e-procurement, in large part because solution capabilities and organizational requirements show so much variation compared with each other.

Spend Matters welcomes this guest post from Laurent Charpentier, COO and chief innovation officer at Yooz Inc.

When it comes to information security, there might appear to be a dichotomy between what many providers boast as an AP automation solution that is both transparent and secure. A dichotomy because typically when we think of secure, we imagine things like being locked in a file cabinet, stored in a bank vault or safe, accessed by only certain people with biometric verification. That doesn’t sync up with something that is transparent — fully visible and easily accessible. But actually, transparency and security overlap more than you think when it comes to today’s smart AP automation solutions.

In recent years, Oracle has transformed itself from the inside out, from a procurement solutions perspective, putting its full force behind building a suite of applications designed for the cloud — rather than behind the firewall.

It has reinforced this product development and go-to-market effort with strong incentives to existing customers to migrate from E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards to its Cloud solutions line. And it has successfully been targeting new procurement customers — some of which do not have an Oracle back-end.

This Spend Matters PRO research brief provides a recap and summary of Oracle’s Cloud procurement applications, shares insight into roadmap direction for the suite and explores recent investments in artificial intelligence and other enabling technologies. Organizations wanting a primer on Oracle Procurement Cloud can read our Vendor Snapshot series: Background/Solution Overview, Strengths/Weaknesses and Summary, and Competitive Overview/Recommendations.

I spend a lot of time in product demos, discussing product features and functionality with the analyst community, digging into technology, and harassing our pre-sales team. I’ve gained a wealth of knowledge about purchase-to-pay software – more than you probably want – but what I’ve also learned is that there are some slippery providers out there. They might deliver a slick demo, but there’s quite a bit of information they’re not telling you, and only one party stands to lose in that situation: you. Keep reading for some examples of how our competitors have offered creative storytelling instead of the truth about what their product can and can’t do.

With its new Intelligent Payment Discounts solution, Oracle is bridging the worlds of procurement and finance together in a unique way that unifies procurement, accounts payable and core financials.

In Part 1 of this research brief, we offered a detailed overview of this new, AI-based solution, providing an introduction to its different components for organizations that might consider it.

In today’s installment, we will conclude our analysis, exploring Oracle Intelligent Payment Discounts’ strengths and weaknesses related to other early payment solutions, either as an extension of invoice-to-pay or on a standalone trade-financing basis — and provide a user requirements checklist to help companies prioritize if the solution is the right fit for them.

Our analysis includes a perspective on the advantage that Oracle has in selling this solution compared to other early payment and financing solutions (e.g., C2FO, Prime Revenue, Taulia, etc.) and procure-to-pay/invoice-to-pay (e.g., Basware, Coupa, Ivalua, SAP Ariba, etc.) outside of feature/function capability alone based on its unified architecture with Oracle Cloud Financials. That is, for companies migrating, upgrading or switching to Oracle Cloud — not those on legacy E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft or JD Edwards solutions.

In this Spend Matters Plus series, we explore what makes run-of-the-mill electronic invoicing (e-invoicing) implementations different from those that are transformative and capable of aligning procurement and accounts payable (A/P) with broader business outcomes and metrics. In this analysis, we delve into topics that are important for procurement and A/P teams to discuss with their solution providers — and prospective providers — to enable a world-class e-invoicing deployment on their terms.

As part of this research brief, we first consider the corporate and public perspective on initiatives (aimed at the private sector), both of which involve differing goals, albeit with the need of the individual company deploying capabilities to keep in mind various sets of requirements regardless. In part, depending on jurisdiction, this dual “master” requirement — the business and government — is something that makes e-invoicing quite unique in the area of procurement technology. Next, we include a list of 10 key elements to diagnose the quality of an e-invoicing deployment and how providers stack up, as well as key e-invoicing questions to evaluate your performance and implementation, trends and value-add services that select e-invoicing providers are addressing. Finally, we provide an e-invoicing architecture framework to construct, deploy and manage a set of enabling capabilities based on your specific requirements.

At the recent Oracle Modern Business Experience event, artificial intelligence figured prominently in many of the mainstage and breakout sessions. Not surprisingly, AI is working its way into Oracle’s procurement suite of cloud capabilities.

Oracle’s investments in AI are centered across several areas leveraging a range of underlying algorithmic approaches (e.g., semantic analysis, neural nets, deep learning, etc.) that individually or collectively serve to enable different business use cases centered on what Oracle calls pattern recognition, smart recognition and smart prediction.

Within its procurement suite of cloud solutions, Oracle has released two AI-driven applications: intelligent supplier categorization (think spend classification) and intelligent payment discounts.

This two-part Spend Matters PRO research brief provides an introduction to the intelligent payment discounting module. For an introduction to the Oracle Procurement Cloud, see our previous Vendor Snapshot coverage (Overview and Introduction, Strengths / Weaknesses and Recommendations/Competitive Alternatives) and Comparative SolutionMap ratings as part of SolutionMap for Q1 2019 for E-Procurement, Invoice-to-Pay and Procure-to-Pay.

Part 1 of this research brief provides a description of capabilities and review of the solution itself — what it does, how it works and how AI makes it effective. Part 2 explores the strengths and weaknesses of the solution and provides customer recommendations.

MineralTree, a solution provider for accounts payable and payments automation, announced this week that it has received $50 million from three investment firms and that it plans to expand into the middle market. “The entire sector is one large Trojan horse to get to payables/financing and/or broader invoice-to-pay or procure-to-pay enablement — aside from generating value for organizations in its own right,” Spend Matters' Jason Busch says.

David Gustin is the chief strategy officer for The Interface Financial Group responsible for digital supply chain finance and is a contributing author to Trade Financing Matters.

Facilitating B2B payments is certainly the “in” thing these days as witnessed by some of the more recent acquisitions — see Jason Busch’s Spend Matters’ post Another Payment Provider Gets Acquired.

Why all the excitement? The market sees opportunities around three areas — interchange fees, cross border payments and FX.

For many payment companies that deliver solutions to automate payments and accounts payable, their core value proposition, infrastructure and business model are built around converting their clients’ suppliers to card payment.

Spend Matters recently ran two surveys (one to procurement/finance practitioners and one to technology providers) in preparation for the launch of the Spend Matters Accounts Payable Automation SolutionMap later in 2019. Many of our questions focused on how users and providers define the bounds of AP automation solutions since there is often a disconnect even within the vendor community — let alone the user community. Accounts payable technology covers many business areas, so the market for the solutions is confusing. It's hard to compare them apples to apples.

The intersection between procurement, accounts payable automation, payment technologies and card providers continued to converge today as Fleetcor announced it was acquiring Nvoicepay. The transaction marks yet another example of card-based payment providers getting closer to the world of buyer-driven procure-to-pay — and of course, the vendor corollary, accounts receivable — given the opportunity for supplier-driven payment acceleration.