Today’s blog post is by guest author, David Sentongo, Director of Commercial Product Management at Kofax. David leads the direction of the Finance & Accounting portfolio, driving innovation and providing customers with solutions — allowing them to digitally transform their finance and accounting organizations. Kofax, a CoupaLink technology partner, enables organizations to digitally transform document-intensive workflows.
Because accounts payable is a back-office function, it doesn’t always take center stage as businesses look to grow or build competitive advantage. It has been dominated by manual, paper-based processes for the capture, matching, approval, and archival of supplier invoices. These processes are high touch, high volume, and take time.
The reality is that an accounts payable department’s goldmine of financial data can drive working capital management, payment-term optimization, budget monitoring, and risk mitigation decisions. Today, more than ever, there are business and global pressures that are driving us to use that “goldmine” and make changes now. However, it all begins with accounts payable realizing operational efficiencies and making changes — using automation to eliminate manual processes so they can focus on “move the needle” activities.
The accounts payable function is faced with an unprecedented opportunity to elevate its stature within the enterprise: leverage automation to accelerate the journey toward being a value center and provider of insights vs. a transactional function. However, only 10 percent of accounts payable leaders describe their departments as being fully automated, with few or no manual tasks. There is much work to do.
Streamlining Accounts Payable Processes with Automation
A shared commitment to streamlining and innovating critical accounts payable processes, like the invoicing process, is what brought Kofax and Coupa together.
Today, Coupa and Kofax customers can take advantage of Kofax’s CoupaLink certified integration to connect the Kofax ReadSoft Online solution with the Coupa Business Spend Management platform and further transform invoice processing from suppliers.
Using this CoupaLink certified integration, joint customers can leverage market-leading document intelligence and machine learning from Kofax to extract data from e-invoices as well as supplier paper and other non-electronic invoices (these can span multiple formats and languages). Then, they can route extracted data into downstream spend management processes managed by Coupa — significantly reducing processing time and overhead.
The CoupaLink certified integration significantly reduces complexity and accelerates time to value for those who have invested in both Coupa and Kofax together. The integration is complementary to Coupa’s leading Invoice and AP Automation solutions. In addition to the integration supporting all Coupa invoice types, it also supports invoices without line-item tables, extraction of tax data and multiple tax rates, and data templates for mapping custom fields.
What does this mean?
Joint customers now have a smooth path toward getting more out of their investments to drive spend management processes and improve operational efficiency.
Here’s a snapshot of 5 ways the Kofax and Coupa integration transforms mission-critical procure-to-pay processes and enhances spend management:
- Improved data accuracy: Leverage Kofax best-in-class data extraction rates as high as 95% (typically not less than 80%) through multiple channels — including email, upload and scanning
- Greater profitability: Reduce processing costs by eliminating manual keying and manual verification
- 24/7 availability with an average uptime of 99.9%: Multi-tenant cloud service with AI/machine-learning-engine capabilities requires no hardware or software investments or time-consuming maintenance, upgrades, or updates
- Support for over 30 languages: Complete invoice extraction and management delivers complete country and language capabilities, including simplified Chinese — out of the box
- Enhanced supplier relationships: Faster invoice processing eliminates late-payment penalties and increases early-payment-discount opportunities
Learn More
To find out more about the integration and how you can benefit from it — please view the Kofax webinar — Intelligent Automation for Finance & Accounting Workflow Transformation.
If you would like to discuss your current deployment or have questions, please reach out to your Coupa Representative.