Skalable Technologies Debuts AI Invoice Processing Tool

Skalable Technologies announced Wednesday (July 17) the launch of Skalable Stream, an accounts payable (AP) automation solution.

In a press release, Skalable explained that Stream operates as an add-on application integrating artificial intelligence (AI) to process accounts payable transactions. Designed for organizations with a high volume of payables,  Skalable integrates into Microsoft Dynamic 365 for Finance and Operations for easier accounting and reconciliation.

“Customers dealing with huge volumes of incoming vendor invoices and short accounting staff found Skalable Stream to be a valuable and cost-effective tool,” the company’s Founder Sunil Nelabhotla said in a statement. “It’s turned the challenge of invoice management into an automated process for them.”

Skalable Stream aims to manage the entire lifecycle of an invoice from receipt to payment and reconciliation, allowing companies to more seamlessly manage received bills, process and pay them, and retain key data for their back-office financial management processes. The solution also integrates with NetSuite and other cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms, the company said.

Skalable Technologies debuted the Stream service at the Microsoft Inspire 2019 conference this week, it said.

Invoice processing is often a key barrier to accounts payable automation. According to the May 2019 Payables Friction Index, a collaboration between PYMNTS and Corcentric, more than 35 percent of businesses surveyed agreed that electronic invoices can reduce friction in manual AP processes.

Yet nearly 42 percent of invoices are still sent via fax machine, and even more  — more than 72 percent —  are sent through the post, the Index found.

The ERP system is quickly becoming a target for AP automation solution providers as a platform to promote a single source of truth for various financial processes. According to IntelliChief Product Manager and Senior Sales Engineer Sean Ryland, the ERP can play a key role in the invoice matching and payments process because of its ability to provide that single source of truth.

“You certainly aren’t looking to replace the ERP, but you get into a gray area where you take over a lot of the function of the ERP as part of the matching process,” he said in an interview in January with PYMNTS. “You want to alleviate manual processes to make invoice processing touchless, and get the invoice straight through to payments — but without recreating the ERP.”