Coupa Goes In On B2B Payments Data

Corporate spend management firm Coupa has wrapped up its Inspire 2016 conference, with no shortage of announcements for the company. Earlier this week, the firm revealed an integration with corporate travel booking platform Sabre, streamlining the expense management process following business trip planning.

On Thursday (May 12), Coupa rolled out a few new features for its financial services offering.

First, it announced an enhancement to its Big Data capabilities, a move the company said would aim to boost data visibility and analytics for businesses to more quickly adjust spend and make financial decisions.

Companies will access these Big Data services through the Coupa Analytics solution, the firm noted. It aggregates data from eProcurement, eInvoicing, travel and expenses and other financial business processes.

“So many organizations struggle with having the visibility they need,” said Coupa Vice President of Technology David Williams in a statement. “Since we started, we knew that the key to insightful analytics that would actually improve results was that people needed to adopt the underlying systems.”

In a separate announcement, Coupa revealed the launch of InvoiceSmash, an application to streamline and accelerate invoice processing using technology to digitize invoices received into a format compatible with corporate accounts payable departments.

InvoiceSmash, which will see a rollout later this year, also looks to go beyond legacy optical character recognition technology to digitize invoices, the company added.

Coupa Vice President of Product Marketing and Management Raja Hammoud said the solution was developed to reduce AP costs through automation and digitization. The company added that the tool will address compliance, supplier participation and data quality.