Invoice Processing and Inventory Management with AP Automation
by The Ottimate Editorial Team
Simplifying Invoice Processing and Inventory Management with AP Automation AI (Joe Lombardi Part 1)
AI-driven automation is changing the way that companies manage their financials. To kick off a new interview series on this topic with subject matter experts, we interviewed Joe Lombardi, Ottimate’s manager of solutions engineers. In this first installment, he reveals how new technology is helping businesses work smarter, which advances machine learning is making for hospitality, grocery, and retail organizations, and why invoice processing, spend management, and inventory control are becoming easier than ever.
OTTIMATE: Could you give me a quick overview of Ottimate and what makes the company different from other providers?
JOE LOMBARDI: Ottimate is an AP automation solution that leverages machine learning AI to digitize invoices and automate workflows within a company’s organization. This enables those invoices to get posted in their ERP system and facilitates payment of those invoices. It helps you manage your AP process with a lot of automation.
What I love about Ottimate is that our UI is extremely intuitive. I’ve had clients tell me that they can fumble through our product and know what to do. Usually when you think about fintech software that helps out in the accounting world or with finance teams, it isn’t easy to navigate. It tends to be complex and have a lot of functions, and that’s confusing to someone who isn’t very tech savvy. So Ottimate being intuitive is very valuable.
Another benefit is our tech stack. Our AI machine learning is some of the most advanced in the space and we benchmark it against Azure and GPT-4. We’ve been around for over 10 years digitizing invoices and were one of the first in the space to do so. And I’m happy to report that we have a really high accuracy rating of 98.7%.
OTTIMATE: Can you describe your role?
JOE: My title is Manager of Solutions Engineers. I was the original solutions engineer that joined the Ottimate team approximately two years ago. And in our role, we assist the sales team in crafting custom solutions for our clients to make sure that they achieve success with Ottimate. Our role doesn’t stop there. We’re helping with demo creation, demo content, and product content. We ensure that our onboarding team members are set up for success.
We’ve spent so much time learning about the product. We tend to be a resource for other teams to help simplify a lot of the complex product functions so they can understand how these work and help clients utilize them effectively.
OTTIMATE: Who are some of your main target customers?
JOE: In terms of the personas that would be utilizing Ottimate, it’s the accounts payable team members in an organization. Those are the primary customers. They’re the ones that handle invoices on a day-to-day basis. But it doesn’t stop there because our Purchase Order Match product involves the procurement and operations teams. Our advanced approval workflows include department heads and senior leaders. With payment automation, we’ll be touching revenue managers, treasurers, CFOs, VPs of finance, and even CEOs. When it comes to money in an organization, there are usually a lot of people who have an interest in that. And so with Ottimate, they will be involved in some way.
OTTIMATE: How do the solutions you just mentioned help customers achieve their objectives?
JOE: You want to know what their objectives are. For an AP team, they often include processing invoices as efficiently as possible. That means eliminating data entry and automatically mapping and coding invoices. Ottimate also allows you to create approval workflows for your teams so that they can send invoices to the proper team members to get them approved in a more efficient manner than just using e-mail.
Our product enables those teams to achieve goals through the layers of automation that we have and how our AI and machine learning not only digitize the invoices, but also map and code them automatically. There are many different solutions that help teams achieve their objectives.
OTTIMATE: Is there another common customer goal that Ottimate helps customers meet?
JOE: Efficiency in closing the books in a timely manner. Having been a former CFO myself, I remember that when we would put together our financial reports, it was always a complicated process. We would have to redo them and redo them and redo them. And then when we started reviewing with other senior leaders, inevitably we would come across invoices or journal entries that required us to dig deeper and to understand how they got posted there. How come someone didn’t notice this? Ottimate is great at allowing these teams to close their books faster and eliminate a lot of that excessive review because you’re getting that work done in Ottimate in a timely manner with the use of our automation.
OTTIMATE: Could you give me another example of how Ottimate provides a solution for a specific industry or department or process?
JOE: Certainly. This is one of our newer features, and I’m really excited about it because I think it’s going to help our customers in the grocery and retail spaces. We’ve developed a product called Catalog Price Match, which allows our grocery users to upload a catalog pricing list into our software. Then once Ottimate digitizes their invoices, it uses that catalog to automatically map their line items on the invoice to their existing catalog.
For grocery or retail clients, their catalog includes the pricing information that they’ve negotiated with their vendors. The reason this is so impactful is that oftentimes when they get the products that they’re receiving at the back door, they not only have to count to see that they have the correct cases, but also need to compare that information to what’s on the invoice to make sure that they’re being charged the correct prices.
With our catalog match product, we’ll be able to highlight the discrepancies in price based on what we’re seeing on the invoice versus what’s in their catalog. Their back door receivers don’t have to review the invoice to track that information anymore because Ottimate is doing that now. They just need to count cases. It reduces their load and what they are responsible for. Ottimate also takes a level of human data entry and error out of their process and makes it a more efficient solution altogether. It saves a lot of time and reduces manual effort.
OTTIMATE: Who are some of your target industries?
JOE: As an AP tool that started in the hospitality space, our earliest target customers were restaurants, hotels, and country clubs. We’ve really done a great job of creating solutions for those clients and are a leader in AP automation in that industry.
Beyond that, we have now gone into the grocery space, as I mentioned with our Catalog Price Match. We’re delivering a unique solution that grocery stores and retailers didn’t really have access to before Ottimate came on the scene. We’re also starting to see a lot of success with healthcare companies, contracted services like lawn care, HVAC, and refrigeration.
If you’re processing invoices and have to do a lot of data entry, you’re going to find Ottimate to be a helpful solution. We work with some bookkeeping companies and CPA firms as well who are now using Ottimate within their tech stack to support their clients. And maybe these clients don’t even know that it’s running behind the scenes.
OTTIMATE: What are some commonalities and differences in how some of these customers use the product?
JOE: In hospitality, not only do we assist restaurateurs and hoteliers with AP automation, but we can also populate their software to help them track inventory better. We’re enabling country clubs to treat their individual resorts as an individual organization, where each one of their departments is almost its own Ottimate environment so that they can better manage their approval policies.
When it comes to the grocery and retail space, our Catalog Price Match and Purchase Order Match products are enabling them to speed up their receiving process and know with greater speed if they’re paying the wrong price or are experiencing a lot of variances. For contracted services organizations, manufacturing and distribution services, and in healthcare, purchase order matching is going to eliminate a lot of data entry that might have been needed to review invoices and purchase orders.
With our spend management tool, the restaurant industry — and I can speak from personal experience — can eliminate petty cash. Imagine reducing your liability because you’re using an AP automation tool. Now you don’t have to carry cash within your organization. That means you reduce theft and shrinkage, and you get things done faster because you don’t have a stack of receipts on your desk.
Want to see Ottimate in action? Schedule a demo today.
And check back soon for part two in this series!