As economic concerns increase, many companies begin to reduce their staff to control costs; 88 percent of job loss in routine occupations occurs within 12 months of a recession. While economicda uncertainty continues, Veryfi has emerged as a trusted, reliable partner for companies seeking greater efficiency and stronger customer relationships, continuing its strong annual recurring revenue (ARR) growth. In the second quarter, Veryfi added over a dozen new logos and major accounts including a top supplier of enterprise resource planning software and one of the world's largest CRM/Direct Marketing Network companies. "As companies seek new ways to increase efficiency and manage costs to position themselves for a challenging economy, Veryfi is leading the way, applying AI to automate routine data entry and streamline business processes," said Ernest Semerda, co-founder and CEO of Veryfi. "In Q2, we welcomed over a dozen new customers and multiple strategic accounts spanning key use cases from loyalty marketing to intelligent automation for accounts payable. We are seeing cross-market demand for our Veryfi technology."

For modern businesses, gaining value and cutting costs extends to every area of operations--including how they pay their bills. As automation, artificial intelligence, and the digital transformations they support become an increasingly common and important part of effective business process management, automating the accounts payable (AP) function has become a popular first step in achieving greater efficiency, value, and performance. The next step--leveraging artificial intelligence in accounts payable--holds the potential to increase these gains and help organizations of all sizes and types achieve true, end-to-end AP automation. Understanding the importance of advanced artificial intelligence in accounts payable, and adding it to your overall AP optimization paradigm, can help your business meet its goals more effectively while helping to lay a foundation for full digital transformation. Traditionally, AP processes follow the same basic pattern, regardless of industry.

Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to make its way throughout the back office, exploring new areas to automate and optimize, freeing up human experts for more strategic initiatives. Today, the standard level of AI in a process like accounts payable (AP) most often appears as a technology that can automatically "read" key documents like invoices and identify and extract important information like supplier and pricing. Alexander T. Hagerup, co-founder and CEO of Vic.ai, recently told PYMNTS that AI has a far greater opportunity in the enterprise, including in AP automation. In an interview, Hagerup discussed his vision for the technology's presence in a notoriously complex and manual area of the back office and considered what the adoption curve may look like as more professionals feel comfortable with technology taking over important actions. As AI technology becomes more sophisticated, some of the most ingrained pain points of AP workflows no longer seem like difficult challenges to overcome.

The revolutionary movement of the digital payments landscape is well underway, with new entrants and technologies in the B2C and peer-to-peer lending (P2P) sphere evolving continuously. However, there has been one sphere where the rate of innovation hasn't yet been reflected by other industries, specifically the B2B payments domain. According to CB Insights, the B2B payments sector is set to become a $20 trillion business by the end of this year. A multitude of payment providers, including PayPal and various other Fintech startups, have already sought to reduce the burden and repetitive processes associated with B2B payments. But the decisive question here is why has it taken so long for B2B payments to make its way to the digital age. "Today's $3 trillion worldwide SMB credit gap is narrowing because the criteria to secure loans are changing, and increasingly, embracing alternative data sources."

Medline Industries, a manufacturer and distributor of medical supplies, based in Northfield, Ill., is growing quickly, said Sarah Stokes, director of accounts payable at the company. That means double-digit sales growth year over year, she said, but it also means more paperwork. "Our biggest challenge is trying to keep up with the volume," Stokes said. To help tackle the 2,000 invoices the company receives each day, Medline has turned to optical character recognition (OCR) technology from vendor Abbyy, paired with platforms from several RPA vendors. The combination has gone a long way in automating accounts payable, Stokes said.

Shamrock Solutions supports a variety of financial department solutions for accounts payables, accounts receivables, and remittance processing. These solutions address a range of processes including invoice processing, audits, account openings, expense reporting, payment options, customer engagement, and order entry. All accounting procedures, especially remittance and AR/AP processing, are critical to any organization's financial well-being. Manual data entry of invoices is an inefficient, expensive, labor-intensive and often error-prone process. Slow and mistake-laden document processing lengthens payment cycles, reduces staff productivity, adds late payment penalties and causes missed early payment discounts.

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Successful businesses care for extensive cash flow planning. Being aligned with your payment terms for payables and receivables, or planning your cash needs for the next quarter or year is not a minor task. Many finance teams that we talked to had the data to make it right, but there was some hiccup which hampered end results. What is cash flow forecast? Cash flow forecast has traditionally been performed based on experience and intuition, in an excel environment.

For any organization with an attitude of, "It can't happen to me," here's a wakeup call: Corporate fraud is common and on the rise. Earlier this year, researchers at the Association for Financial Professionals found that instances of check fraud and Business Email Compromise scams increased between 2015 and 2017, with fraud originating both within and outside the enterprise. One of the easiest areas for internal fraud to occur is in employee expensing. Especially for businesses that rely on manual expense reports, management and auditing processes, an employee that fudges a dollar amount here and there, or a worker who accidentally submits an expense report twice, mean companies can easily fall victim to fraud, both intentional and unintentional. "Every corporation wants to believe, 'Our organization is very well run, and all of our employees have the right intent,'" said Anant Kale, founder and CEO of AppZen. "And the reality is that the majority of people absolutely do have the right intent; they do the right thing.