Accounts Payable Resources | Xelix

What is Invoice Intelligence? - Xelix

Written by Phil Watts - Co-Founder and CPO | Nov 27, 2020 12:00:00 AM

We spend a lot of time thinking about ‘Invoice Intelligence’. It’s a term we’ve thought up to describe the technology that sits right at the heart of our business.

The Merriam Webster dictionary defines ‘intelligence’ as:

“The ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations.”

And this is a good reflection of how we use the word when we think about Invoice Intelligence, as it refers to how our technology knows what to do when it is presented with a mountain of new data.

As we know, data today is omnipresent and processing it can be challenging, but our technology is capable of absorbing huge data sets in real-time to produce outputs that truly add value. We believe that it’s this technological intelligence, combined with our forward-thinking product design, that makes our offering just that little bit special.

Reducing invoice processing risks with Machine Learning

Xelix Protect demonstrates Invoice Intelligence in action. It uses machine learning and a number of rules-based algorithms to detect risks and errors at both the invoice level and within the master vendor data, meaning we can draw on a repository of data that we’ve gathered over time.

To achieve a high level of accuracy, we use over 30 algorithms, 9 Machine Learning models and 3,000 separate decision trees. These cutting-edge technologies work in harmony to classify each invoice. The end result is an algorithm that is truly intelligent and one that far surpasses human intelligence. That technological firepower allows us to gather more than 300 data points from every invoice we analyse.

Over time, as we gather more intelligence, our technology evolves. As it gains more data with every invoice, it improves the accuracy of its output, meaning finance teams only investigate legitimate errors prior to payment. Like human intelligence – which grows through study – the harder our technology works, the more it grows, too.

The ability to learn and grow is fundamental to our invoice intelligence platform.

Invoice Intelligence with insights gained in real-time

Our technology does more than detecting and alerting finance teams to potential risks. Xelix Insight provides customers with real-time insights hidden within the data that they’re handling every day. More often than not, these insights will be buried; the Xelix technology brings them to light.

Up until now, the most common way for finance teams to extract insight from their payables data was by downloading reams of reports and consolidating numbers in Excel. This is inefficient, ineffective and slows down decision making.

By analysing over 300 data points per invoice, our technology can provide both retrospective insight and predictive analytics that allow for smarter decision making. Xelix looks at all of these individual data points and then contextualises them against all of the other invoices in a dataset. It can then draw an accurate picture of what’s going on and enable you to derive valuable insights.

With all this data beautifully displayed at your fingertips, you can gather intelligence on areas such as team productivity, working capital management and much more. All of these elements can help to shape the future of your business.

Intelligent tech that makes Accounts Payable teams more efficient

Given the complexity, variety and volume of invoice data that most companies are processing nowadays, traditional approaches to invoice audits aren’t going to stand up to the task. Older systems fall down when trying to accurately identify errors, needing humans to oversee the process. This leads to hundreds of hours of wasted time investigating legitimate transactions.

Our AI has been trained on over 100 million invoices which means from Day One, Xelix will remove the audit headache for an accounts payable clerk, allowing them to focus on a broader range of tasks that really add value. Whether that means reducing risk or offering insights, our technology should be considered an extra member of your team, making work more efficient and enjoyable.

Intelligent design for ease of use

Our technology has also been intelligently designed. When a human does have to step in and help, the process is as easy as possible. For example, if a business has unusual invoicing patterns previously unseen by our AI, our technology, such as the ‘Action Buttons’ within the platform, can teach the AI, initiating self-learning which rapidly improves the speed and accuracy of the output.

By combining best in class AI-led technology, with forward-thinking product UI and UX, we hope to help you and your business reduce AP risk and find game-changing insights. As your business grows and evolves, our technology will learn and grow with it.

And that’s what we believe makes Xelix, the world’s first invoice intelligence platform, truly intelligent.