Why Ottimate Built The First AI Engine Dedicated for AP – And What It Means For You
by Krishna Janakiraman
Let’s face it: accounts payable isn’t always a well-oiled machine. Between processing dense, multi-page invoices, chasing down approvals, and reconciling payments, AP teams often feel like they’re playing a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. The pressure to close the books, while also managing errors, exceptions, and outdated tools, can take a serious toll on both productivity and profitability.
Ottimate is changing all of that.
This week, we launched the industry’s first proprietary AI engine built specifically to address the unique complexities of the AP landscape. In this post, we’ll take a closer look at what Ottimate’s AI engine is, why we built it, how it outperforms OCR-based systems and commercial AI models, and how it’s already driving real productivity and profitability gains for finance teams.
Why we built our own AI engine
There’s no shortage of AI tools on the market. But most AP automation tools just don’t cut it.
Traditional AP automation has its limitations
Every finance professional knows that AP isn’t as simple as scanning documents or extracting text. It also involves making sense of handwritten notes, inconsistent formats, verifying line-level details, and handling dense invoices that span dozens of pages and hundreds of line items.
Traditional approaches, which are often built on Optical Character Recognition (OCR), aren’t made for that level of complexity.
Even the best OCR engines are slow and prone to errors. When you layer AI on top of that, it exacerbates the situation. The errors from OCR tend to propagate downstream, compromising the accuracy of the entire process.
A custom model was the only answer
We knew the only way to solve AP’s unique challenges was to take matters into our own hands by building our own AI engine.
Ottimate’s AI engine is a proprietary, end-to-end deep learning stack that’s purpose-built for AP. It combines our own in-house vision-language models with a fine-tuned version of Google’s Gemini model. The result? A powerful engine capable of handling even the most complex invoices quickly and with a remarkable degree of accuracy. In fact, our AI engine processes 95% of invoices instantly, significantly outperforming frontier models such as Claude (80%), OpenAI GPT-4 Vision (65%), and Gemini 2.0-base (78%).
Building our own model gives us complete control over how the model learns, adapts, and performs. It enables us to extract data from invoices without relying on time-intensive and error-prone OCR. More importantly, it allows organizations to process invoices with the speed and accuracy that legacy systems simply can’t match.
Built on a decade of AP expertise
Make no mistake – Ottimate’s AI engine wasn’t built overnight.
Ottimate has been working in AP automation for over a decade, and we have the deep domain knowledge and data to make it work. In fact, the company has been building and training machine learning models since 2014. That means we’ve had years to understand AP-specific document behaviors and how to build and train models that can effectively handle them.
Why it matters for you
Of course, building a powerful AI engine isn’t just a technical win. It’s also a huge business advantage to our users.
For AP teams, the payoff comes down to two factors: speed and accuracy. When invoices can be processed quickly, with exceptional precision and minimal human intervention, the entire finance workflow improves significantly.
“We heard loud and clear from CFOs that speed and accuracy are major levers for their business, and being able to deliver both is a significant competitive differentiator,” said Barrett Boston, CEO of Ottimate.
These gains in productivity and accuracy directly translate into improved bottom-line results.
Increased productivity
Ottimate’s AI engine automates the most time-consuming parts of invoice processing, including coding, matching, verifying, and routing. Plus, because the engine processes invoices with an incredible degree of accuracy, finance staff don’t need to micromanage every step of the workflow.
This frees up time and resources across the board, allowing finance teams to:
- Process higher invoice volumes without adding additional headcount
- Focus on higher-value tasks like vendor negotiation or forecasting
- Close the books faster at the end of each period, with fewer exceptions
Higher accuracy = higher profitability
Invoice errors aren’t just inconvenient – they’re also expensive. Overpayments, mismatched pricing, and missed approvals can slowly (but surely) chip away at profit margins.
Ottimate’s AI engine processes even the most complex invoices within seconds and with an accuracy of 99.5% for header-level capture and 95% at the line-item level, which helps finance teams catch and prevent those mistakes before they happen. It flags cost discrepancies, applies business rules, and ensures data integrity across every invoice.
Built-in oversight
Ottimate’s AI engine automates a significant portion of the workflow. But it doesn’t take away control from finance teams.
Each invoice is assigned a trust score based on signals like invoice history, source email, and amount patterns. Invoices with high trust scores can be auto-approved, while exceptions are routed for review.
This approach balances efficiency with control. AP teams can move faster, without sacrificing accuracy or oversight.
Drive productivity and profitability with Ottimate’s AI engine
By integrating these profitability-enhancing controls into your operations, you gain more than just efficiency—you directly protect and improve your bottom line.
Catching pricing discrepancies, overbilling, and delivery mismatches early prevents margin erosion. Eliminating payment mismatches and reducing the need for costly corrections leads to cleaner books and more accurate cost reporting. Safeguarding your processes against fraud and leakage protects both your financial integrity and your reputation.
By optimizing payment timing and improving cash flow visibility, you unlock working capital and enhance your financial agility. These gains aren’t theoretical—they translate into measurable, lasting profitability.
As Trevor Vecellio, Senior Staff Accountant at The Club at Admirals Cove shared: “Using Ottimate allows us to see our data in a timely manner, due to the quick processing of the AI automation. This leads to more accurate financials for our board.”
Ready to see Ottimate’s AI engine in action? Book a demo today!