How AP Automation uses AI

AP Automation works together with the Sage Network to provide artificial intelligence capabilities to automate your workflow. The Sage Network is a secure platform that can connect you with your ecosystem of customers, suppliers, employees, banks, and governments.

When you submit an AP purchase invoice by email or upload, AP Automation uses the Sage Network AI to do the following:

• Correctly identify the supplier.
• Extract details such as names, dates, addresses, and line items.
• Code dimension details, such as the GL account, location, and department.
• Create a draft transaction using this information, that's ready for you to review and post.
• Detect and flag duplicates, so you don't overpay.

To recognize supplier documents, know how to extract information from them, and make improvements to AI predictions, AI uses machine learning (ML) technology.

How ML works

ML requires a lot of data to learn how to process incoming AP purchase invoices accurately. This data is used to build a model that helps AI know how to do the following:

• Recognize a wide variety of AP purchase invoice layouts.
• Understand the different ways in which names, addresses, dates, and line items can be presented.
• Match AP purchase invoices to the right supplier records.
• Code GL accounts and dimensions for transactions from a particular supplier.

ML relies on collective activity on the Sage Network to learn how to read AP purchase invoices in the most efficient way. Rather than learn only from the hundreds or thousands of AP purchase invoices submitted to your company, ML has the opportunity to learn from millions of AP purchase invoices submitted to many companies, with all privacy and safety laws applied on the collective data. By accessing this collective data, AP Automation is able to create transactions for all suppliers with greater precision, over time.

In addition to collective activity, ML also learns from the changes and corrections that are unique to your company. Each time you review a draft transaction and post corrections, this information is sent back to the Sage Network to update the ML model. Your company-specific data helps AP Automation deliver more accurate supplier matches, and properly code line-item dimensions.

How soon will I see improvements?

The more you use AP Automation, the faster AI learns, and the better it becomes at creating accurate draft transactions. In the beginning, your transactions might contain inaccuracies. Over time, as AI learns from you and other users in your company, the accuracy continuously improves. For example, most customers see a dramatic improvement in supplier matching after a month of regular use.

The Sage Network is updated with your changes and corrections every 24 hours. This means that when you correct a supplier match, this information is available to AI on the following day. If you upload more documents from the supplier before the network is updated, AI will not know about your correction when it creates the draft transactions.

ML also looks for consistent changes to make sure that it's not learning from one-off changes that you only want to apply to a single transaction. When you make the same correction multiple times, ML knows to add this information to the ML model and apply it to future transactions. This means you might need to make some corrections several times before AI applies the information to new transactions.

Your data privacy

All customer data shared with the Sage Network is done so while maintaining safety and privacy. Your personal details and specifics around supplier data are never shared with another customer. The data is stored securely in the United States and processed in the United Kingdom and European Union.