How Moderna's AP team used Xelix during $20B growth

Heather joined Moderna in early 2022 and discovered an incredibly fast-paced environment.

“Our Chief Accounting Officer described it as driving a racing car while you’re still building it. Vaccine production was clearly our biggest priority. That meant paying - even pre-paying - materials vendors quickly. You could onboard a vendor, create the purchase order, create the invoice and pay it, all on the same day,” says Heather.

This presented a lot of risk. Heather’s first port of call was to arrange a recovery audit, but at the same time, the Director of P2P Operations was talking to Xelix about automating supplier statement reconciliations.

“We saw that Xelix could mean so much to us: duplicate invoice and vendor detection, plus automated statement reconciliation. Only at the end of the conversation did we appreciate we’d get a retrospective payment audit too,” explains Heather.

When you become a Xelix customer, you receive a free audit of historical payments. Whilst Xelix isn’t a recovery audit firm (our audit doesn’t include recovery), this insight provides huge added value. For Moderna, our retrospective payment audit helped them recover $500,000 in five months, delivering immediate ROI.

Before onboarding Xelix, Moderna would focus its attention on the most complex vendor statements to the detriment of others.

“The largest, noisiest ones got our attention. And it took a lot of manual work. Some could have 200 invoices and a large amount of cash on account. It could take an Accounts Associate hours, or even days, to reconcile. For smaller statements, by the time we got to them, the information was no longer timely. So, we were always chasing our tail on those.

"With Xelix, we’re now reconciling 100% of our statements. As soon as they come in, we reconcile them. That’s a big win for time saved. But also, for team morale.

"Associates are building their careers and can now free up time to work on more interesting projects, such as a new system implementation or Six Sigma Lean projects. This helps build their resumé too.

"Sometimes, you can feel like the unsung hero in AP. You put in hours of work and don’t necessarily get recognition. It’s boosted morale to see Moderna invest in technology that makes AP processes more efficient and improves our daily lives. It’s also made people feel their work is more visible,” says Heather.

The visibility Heather highlights is thanks to Xelix’s reporting module. Providing customisable insight in one place, users can quickly build reports. They can track things like the value of duplicate invoices or how many statements have been reconciled. They can also spot trends and look for causes.

Heather highlights a further important benefit from making the reporting module available to the team.

“When most of us are working at least part-time from home, it can be challenging to feel connected. And that impacts employee wellbeing, which is important to Moderna.

"We can see exactly what the team is working on with Xelix’s reporting. We can also spot any roadblocks the supervisor can support people with. Employees see the progress of others too, which helps them feel connected. It’s a great way to take the team’s temperature on a daily basis,” she says.

Moderna continues to grow quickly. Offices in China, Portugal and Saudi Arabia are imminent. That means Xelix must easily scale too.

“We’re expanding to further countries every month. It’s great to have a standard way to fold these new offices into our organisation. For AP, it’s painless. And it’s painless for our business associates too,” says Heather.

As for developing AP technology, Moderna wants to create an AI chatbot. The aim is to answer simple AP questions or direct the query to the right human. The high volume of vendor queries is a common problem for many of our customers, so we got to work.

Our brand new Helpdesk module solves the challenge of keeping on top of vendor queries. Based on user preferences, our Helpdesk solution categorises inbound vendor queries to support tickets. Using Generative AI, it then looks up the query, and when possible, creates a helpful response for the vendor. The Helpdesk module is now live for customers.