EInvoicing & Automation

Guest contribution by David Brightman, Director of Product Marketing at BlackLine

The last few months have transformed the way finance teams work. The disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic has forced businesses to adopt technological solutions at an accelerated rate, while many businesses operate from their homes, tackling a list of new and ongoing issues remotely. This new way of working has changed the way organisations collaborate internally and interact with their clients, but most noticeably, how businesses approach the adoption of new technology that can transform finance and accounting processes. In this article, I round up the most notable trends that I expect will shape finance and cash management within organisations this year.

Digitisation - It's no longer a question of when

In 2021, it is no longer a question of if Accounting should digitise—but how best to do it. Remote work has become the new normal - so all departments (even those which have been traditionally office-based, such as Accounts Receivable) will be looking for ways to monitor the success of remote workers. The year will see the Controllership invest in technology to turbocharge their digital transformation journeys and move to a modern accounting model that unifies all of a company's systems and data into a single source, automating manual, repetitive activities that drain time and energy, and providing real-time information and analysis to inform business decisions.

Guest contribution by Vincent Poulain D'Andecy

In this article, Vincent Poulain d’Andecy, Research Department Manager at Yooz, revisits his early days at the organisation, which had started using artificial intelligence in Accounting from the very beginning.

At Yooz, why did you decide to use artificial intelligence to automate accounting processes for companies?

Thirty years ago, Yooz’s name was Informatics and Advanced Technologies. The company was already working with the computer science engineering school in Nîmes, France, EERIE, which is now part of the well-regarded Mines d’Alès National Higher School of Engineering.

If you’ve been to an event or read any article about finance or P2P recently, you’ll be familiar with digital transformation. In fact, the term is used so often, it's in danger of becoming meaningless. Used as a short hand for “what you’re doing now is probably wrong,” it’s assumed that everyone is on board with what transformation means and how to go about doing it.

Guest article by Magali Michel, Director, Yooz

AI fascinates us, excites us, even scares us a little (I’m still not sure I want to be on the same roads as self-driving cars!) But there is no denying that AI makes our daily lives so much easier than it was just a few years ago, and much more than imagined.

The positive impact of AI on finance teams

When we talk about AI, we immediately think about virtual assistants or chatbots, like Siri or Alexa, smartphones that identify us through fingerprint or facial recognition, cars that are able to detect pedestrians and to park themselves (often better than humans do). We also think about computers that recognise and analyse documents automatically.