AP Automation
January 13, 2025

Attain Business Financial Goals and AP Visibility for Senior Leaders

by The Ottimate Editorial Team

How AP Automation Helps Organizations Achieve Business Financial Goals and Increases Visibility for Senior Leaders (Don Dittmar Part 3)

Previously in this SME interview series, Ottimate VP and Head of Product Don Dittmar revealed how AP automation provides new insights into spending, expedites invoice processing, and simplifies statement reconciliation. In this final installment of his Q+A, Don shares how Ottimate benefits senior leaders and daily users alike for reaching business financial goals, why integrating AP automation and ERP systems is a potent combination, and what’s next for machine learning in purchasing and payables.


OTTIMATE: How does Ottimate impact customers’ core metrics and goals?

DON DITTMAR: With KPIs in AP, managers or directors can see how many invoices are processed, approval and payment timelines, outstanding payables, and free cashflow. They have greater ability to move levers that impact these things and can make better data-driven decisions. An organization might want to pay key vendors immediately and others slower to maximize float. Ottimate helps control that cashflow. Executives can tie smaller KPIs to bigger goals. It benefits AP staff who just want to get their work done more efficiently and ties back to financial health metrics for the entire company.

A more subjective benefit is improved vendor relationships. These become strained if there are missed payments, especially for small businesses. If someone isn’t getting paid on time, the level of service could go down and it may be for a critical product. With Ottimate, nothing is going to slip through the cracks.

OTTIMATE: Does subjective value also show up in job satisfaction?

DON: Yes. At the end of a quarter in a manual AP organization, there are late evenings, overtime, and piles of paper. Everyone dreads it. You don’t have that with Ottimate. Now people are making decisions, catching unexpected costs, and having a positive impact on the company that’s increasingly valuable over time. Completing work in a modern way lifts morale.

OTTIMATE: You mentioned earlier that senior leaders only see what they need to with Ottimate. Why is that helpful?

DON: I saw a psychological study that showed how the mind goes numb after viewing a paper report three times. But if you just draw attention to anomalies, then the user will dive deeper. Ottimate finds these outliers and ranks them. So if you were paying a dollar for tomatoes and that price spikes, we highlight it. Maybe it’s a normal change, or perhaps it’s a mistake or you used the wrong vendor. The goal is to identify patterns, find what is different, and draw attention to it.

OTTIMATE: How does Ottimate make things easier for approvers?

DON: Simple dollar value is one way to route invoices, but Ottimate can conditionally process them based on any categorization. For example, most organizations treat capital invoices differently, so they need to go to someone who considers depreciation and other factors. Ottimate makes the distinction and sends them to the right users, while expense invoices are routed to approvers and escalated if they’re high priority.

It’s not only learning about the customer’s data, but also what they do with those transactions. If Ottimate sees a repetitive action, it suggests things to the user that they might not know they’re doing and can further automate that process. We’re building machine learning into solution-specific workflows for our customers.

OTTIMATE: What are a few tips for deploying Ottimate effectively?

DON: Prepare for change management. AP automation is not as simple as just applying technology to what you already do. You should ask yourself, “What’s the ideal way we want to work?” and then use Ottimate to get there. Some customers just want a faster way to do the same thing, and Ottimate can do that, but it undervalues the product. Also, get as many exceptions and types of data flows into the system as possible because that’s when Ottimate finds things that you aren’t seeing. 

Think about your approval policies too. Auditors would tell most organizations that they have too many steps or successive approvals. There’s a need for control and to manage risk and Ottimate can handle complex routing, but most companies overdo that. Consider payment options and relationships as well. Do you need more float, or want a return on payables? Do you have buying leverage with your suppliers?

Once you ask these questions, Ottimate gives you the tools to answer them. It will help you get the most out of your terms and agreements, so you can optimize vendor relationships and maximize the cashflow moving through your ERP system. 

OTTIMATE: Speaking of which, what are some ways that Ottimate integrates with ERPs like Acumatica, Sage, or NetSuite?

DON: We’ve got a set of APIs that we maintain and advance, and Ottimate works well with public APIs for SaaS ERP systems. These allow us to post an invoice, retrieve a purchase order, and create a unified solution. For many ERPs, we have a packaged, repeatable version of that integration. When there’s complexity – such as with a third-party inventory management or purchase order system – we use import/export tools that accept and send various file formats.

We can schedule jobs to hand data back and forth with older ERP and inventory systems, like Oracle E-Business Suite or PeopleSoft, and make sure everything is posted. Ottimate actively reconciles transaction counts and alerts users to exceptions. It can also act as a funnel that feeds into multiple ERPs for our larger customers.

I’m also excited that we’re working on applying machine learning to the integration itself. It’s a behind-the-scenes tool that allows us to understand changes in the ERP, certain scenarios or invoices that fail, and why. Then it will present those errors and suggest solutions. That’s a big differentiator for Ottimate customers because it enables the integration to continually monitor itself using machine learning. This ensures that the right information and files are passing back and forth, and instantly flags any errors. The tool is also helping us internally to make our integrations even better.

OTTIMATE: How do customers expand their use of Ottimate after their initial implementation alongside their ERP system?

DON: A lot of our customers start small with a crawl, walk, run approach that often begins with invoice processing. Then they add non-PO invoices and PO line pairing. Two other next steps are catalog matching and VendorPay, which is a fully automated virtual card system.

Our spend management product bundles one-off expenses, store operations, and time and expense reporting into a single package. Our clients add locations as well as solutions. For example, some have success with one or two stores and then instantly expand to their whole network.

ottimate-invoice-automation-product-on-a-laptop-in-a-grocery-store

OTTIMATE: As a former finance executive, what benefits do you see Ottimate providing for senior leadership?

DON: Even with the first generation of AP automation, I found that there was a lot more data available to me for research, with new information extracted from invoices going into our data warehouse. That allowed me to create new queries and start analyzing data differently. A simple workflow rule led to discovering that we had much higher out-of-program purchasing than we believed we did. Now with the new generation of machine learning, customers can do a lot more than this. 

When I was at the senior leadership level, automation created visibility and insight almost immediately. Then as more data went through the system, it created many more opportunities to investigate and understand our spending than I ever had with manual processing. It’s great to save money and time and improve morale, but having greater insight into spending is the biggest benefit for leadership.

OTTIMATE: What excites you about the future of AP automation?

DON: It’s all about the ability to look at what has occurred, find patterns, and predict what may happen – not just in purchasing, invoicing, and paying, but also with user activity. These two information pools create a powerful data model for organizations to change how they buy things. That’s on the very near horizon.

We are an AI- and machine learning-centric organization. One of the benefits of working with us is that we’ve recognized that generational change in this market. We’re highly trusted because we continue to invest in this technology. AI is everywhere right now, but the most successful organizations are the ones who are applying it to certain business problems. That’s what we’re doing here, and it provides a lot of value for our customers.

Want to see how Ottimate can transform your AP processes? Schedule a demo today!

Check back soon for the next interview in our SME series!