The media and advertising arena has undergone dramatic changes over the years, with immense impact on how services are billed and paid for. As organizations navigate their internal digital transformations, adjusting accounts payable (AP) workflows to support those billing shifts is far from simple.
Historically, one of the biggest pain points for AP in the media and advertising arena is coding. The manual processes of routing documents where they need to go to accurately assess and pay invoices have amounted to a major headache, according to Nexelus Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Imran Rahman.
Speaking with PYMNTS, Rahman discussed the opportunity for artificial intelligence (AI) to inject automation into AP workflows while still adhering to the individual requirements of the industry and the unique ways information is displayed on invoices and other documents.
Human Intervention
As organizations push for automated AP, the media and advertising space continues to rely on human intervention to route documents, especially invoices, where they need to go.
That was the crux of the challenge for Nexelus, which recently launched its AP solution designed for this industry. Dubbed apworks.ai, the technology wields AI and machine learning (ML) to automate routing of invoices for streamlined approval and payment.
“This really is what was missing, is the smart routing mechanism using artificial intelligence and machine learning,” said Rahman.
Read more: Nexelus Unveils Cloud-Based Accounts Payable Tool
This is particularly valuable to the media and advertising industry, he noted, considering its high-volume nature. Back-office workflows in this space can be especially convoluted as information and documents pass through both creative and administrative departments.
With humans having historically handled the high volume of documents, there are plenty of opportunities for spending to slip through the cracks.
This can be a similarly difficult conundrum for production and media vendors in this space as well, with often non-standardized coding and insufficient resources to adequately check through invoices and ensure billings are accurate. This can create lost revenues from failed billings or under-billings, he noted.
Gearing Up For Payment
Today, apworks.ai does not facilitate the actual payment of an invoice. Rather, it aims to automate the process of ensuring the accuracy of invoices and appropriate routing in order to streamline workflows up until payment.
Introducing a payment mechanism, however, is on the product roadmap, with Rahman noting that the firm will explore third-party application programming interface (API) integrations to enable transacting.
That API connectivity has already proven key to pre-payment processes as AI and ML technologies need access to a variety of data sources.
“You’re pulling certain pieces of information, and you’re marrying it up with what you have received to ensure those metrics, those billing models, are the ones that you have approved,” Rahman explained, adding that it is imperative to catch any discrepancies or errors ahead of payment in order to avoid overspend.
Having the ability to loop into industry-specific portals like media management or project management solutions is critical to setting the stage for success in AP.
That data integration will similarly be an important piece of the puzzle as Nexelus considers introducing payment functionality to the platform. Whether via a third-party service provider or a proprietary solution, the payment function must not only be able to seamlessly support invoice payments, but loop into corporates’ back-end systems for accounting, reconciliation and analytics purposes.
Yet at the broad level, said Rahman, it’s not only a matter of addressing lost revenue for suppliers and avoiding overspend for customers in AP departments. It’s also about returning a resource to organizations that, like money, is similarly valuable to businesses in the field: time.
See also: AI Updates Demonstrate Value Of Automated AP Systems
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