okay hello everyone welcome to today's event we are going to get started here as we begin please do know that we welcome your questions and you can enter them at any time through the Q&A block to the right of the main presentation area we are presenters today on to unit and Bob Cohen will be saving time at the end for questions so without any further delay I am going to hand things off to honored to be in effect thank you Jason and you say from my part too and welcome to our webinar a topic today is the state of AP automation in the Microsoft Dynamics ecosystem this webinar is hosted by job as as we do ap mechanics light please on today's agenda we have a look at the results of a survey that was conducted by our department the topic of the survey was to examine the state of AP automation specifically amongst the dynamics users there's already a lot of surveys of automation and invoicing and payables in general but our interest was to examine the different differences that there might be when focusing on just Dynamics users after we walk through the survey results we will give you some takeaways and ideas how to go forward but before we start let me start off by introducing our speakers today so my name is a mbuna and I am the CPO of dude up and joining me today is Bob Cohen research director of Aden Partners and before I hand it over to you Bob I'll say just a few words about do app can you change this next slide please so do that is in a calm stable solution designed for ax 2012 and d 365 as a turnkey solution we have a bit of dynamics and provide a mobile and desktop interface for handling your invoices from all steps of the process we also provide for example I'll toast OCR services where invoice ready we aim for touchless three-way matching and support easy mobile approvals through the mobile app then for your business people on the go job was originally designed by AP professionals to AP professionals and we as we have the history of working with Dynamics we know the chart characteristics and effects it has to the best practice processes and now Bob I'd like to hand it over to you so you can see if he was about you an audit partners and research director for ardent partners we are researching advisory firm of specialised resource to pay my particular area of expertise is a payables I've owned the e-payables practice which covers everything from the delivery and receipt of invoices to the processing of the invoices all the way through the payment of set invoices so it's an area that I've worked in for many years now I've worked with thousands of practitioners I know the vendor space extremely well so when do up approached me about doing a survey specifically on the dynamics ecosystem I jumped at the opportunity to participate so a little bit about ardent here in addition to the research and advisory portion of our business we have a number of websites the one that is specific to my practice is called tables place if you're not familiar with it I suggest you take a look it is all about everything tables once a week we have a subject matter expertise piece that's posted there we provide a tech roundup it's really impossible to keep on top of all the news what's going on in the tables and payment space and business networks and working capital management space we try to make that easier so once a week without a tech update and then we usually provide an opportunity to hear from some of the leaders in the States we have our influencers series where we have CEOs primarily from FinTech companies answering a few questions about what they see going on in the space so it's a great opportunity just to learn a little bit more about what's going on in the world that we all live in here in e-payables so now let's get to the real reason why everybody's here the survey and the results here so ardent partners analyzed the data obtained from surveying 118 respondents the respondents were located primarily in North America and we undertook the task of segmenting the data to better understand what's currently going on in the Microsoft dynamic ecosystem and then as we'll discuss through the presentation here how does some of what's going on in the dynamics world compared to the rest of the world that's out there so the Oracle the SAT the JD Edwards for no other reason then it's just good to understand where you stand compared to others as far as a PR amazing and maturity curve etc so we have some data from surveys that we've done called the state of the payables is something we do every year so we're going to compare and contrast some of the data we received from this survey to that survey we're going to provide a view into accounts payable and capture take a look at experience which performances perspectives and the intentions of these 118 80 finance and IT personnel and the real reason is to better understand what's going on from an Accounts Payable perspective in the dynamics world where do you stand how do you stack up are you ahead of the curve are you just getting started there so it'll give you a good idea about what's going on here the data that we saw was pretty much across the board as far as the respondents it was interesting so 34% of our respondents were from companies with a hundred million in revenue or less but 17% of the respondents were from enterprises with greater than a billion dollars that leaves about 50% right there in the sweet spot of a hundred million to a billion dollars in revenue which is typically where we find quite a bit of dynamics users fitting into the next letter there 25% of the respondents were VP or director level and that's important when you're analyzing data you want to make sure that you're just not getting one job roles perspective so just not accounts payable managers or VPS we want to have a blending of the two so we were happy to see that we had a good cross section and cross sampling of the data that was going on there and then also the data that we collected the majority of the respondents a large percentage were from the AX 2012 community followed closely by the dynamics 365 community what was interesting was that second number there were 22 percent of our respondents came from dynamics 365 respondents and why that's interesting is if we did this survey two years ago or three years ago that number would have been single digits so it's important to note understand that the adoption of 365 is on the increase and just to just to be aware of that and how it compares to some of the other operating systems that are out there from in the dynamics ecosystem that are there so it's a newer platform but we're starting to see adoption ramped up that's had a few years ago when we were at dynamics world letter conferences adoption of 365 is very low people said we're looking at it we're considering it we're just beginning it so we're starting to see that ramped up so we do this survey again years going forward I think the 365 number is going to outstrip the 2012 number significantly so let's take a look now at some of the data from the research that's here what we can see here is that 65% of the respondents have less than 100,000 invoices per year and extrapolating a little bit further 58 percent so almost 60% have less than 50,000 invoices per year this these results are in line with art and David Barton's data over the past years when we looked at dynamics customers where dynamics customers and tend to be or dynamic shops tend to be smaller in size and smaller in volume than let's say in Oracle or in Sapa so this was in line with what we expected here so I'm not doing all the talking here I thought a good opportunity to ask on our question now so honor arm you know when someone is looking to automate accounts payable at what volume of invoices does it make sense to start looking for options well there's a kind of a rule of thumb that after 10,000 invoices a year but you should be some kind of looking at automation you want to do that before it becomes a burden of course if you're planning to grow start before you hit that volume most of all it's so easy to do project before your swamp without other things and I'm glad to see that 80% of the respondents are already over that so I'm looking for kind of for the correspondent in the other results of the survey depending back okay so keep moving along here so we took a look at the we asked the respondents what their company revenue was and 58% of respondents had revenue of two hundred and fifty million dollars or less interestingly if we go back to the previous slide or think about the previous slide fifty-eight percent of the respondents also have fifty thousand invoices or less per year coincidence probably not definitely a correlation dynamic customers tend to be on the smaller side with a number of invoices in the revenue side that we have but to every result there's a counter result so you know what was fascinating here as I mentioned earlier 17 percent of the respondents had revenue company revenue over a billion dollars so we're seeing a great polarization here lots on the small side the majority but also dynamics being used by larger organizations and be interesting to find out if the dynamics PRP that they using was their only ERP or who is one of multiple ERPs as tend to often be the case when you get into large multinational organizations very frequently they have multiple ERPs two different divisions two acquisitions or two growth or whatever it may be so maybe that's something if you're one of those companies listening in that's over a billion dollars in revenue it'd be interesting to know if you had more than one ERP and back-end system that was there I guess another question for you on along the lines from the previous one is and your experience is revenue a good indicator for invoice automation well like you said there seems to be a correlation between the invoice volume and and revenue it just extends but with bigger revenue level if we would assume that we would have smaller volumes but but still have bet invoices I wouldn't want to take the rest of risk of missing the cash discounts on any of those bigger invoices by losing the in with in versus somewhere when I don't have a digital trace setup and the controls and the documentation and not to even start about the chance abroad okay great let's keep moving here so as far as employees for company that in our survey here um fifty six percent of the respondents have fewer than 500 employees however once again the polarisation that we're seeing here is fully twenty six percent of the respondents had greater than a thousand employees why is it significant because we typically see higher employee counts for companies in the service sectors and if you're in the service sector there's might be an opportunity to explore automation if it's not if it's something that you're not doing currently just kind of trying to analyze the data that's in here in you and when you take a look at these results in the whole you know when you put these pieces together 60 percent of dynamic respondents here have revenues of less than 250 million here than 50 thousand invoice a tree or less than five hundred employees so many of these companies as on a said there's an opportunity to start looking at automation if something that may not have done before and we'll we'll look at that and get the results a little bit later on but if you're in those that that group of respondents that are under 250 million have fewer than 50 thousand invoices per year less than 500 employees you're in good company because that's where the vast majority of our respondents come from so let's take that's the demographic ated consistent thing about the employees bill that that gives the good direction on the need of automation but the internal structure on how many approvers you have meaning the people who are allowed to order approve invoices is the key so more complex the structure is more people you have involved the more likely you get those invoices lost in the field the correcting act action is not to centralize necessarily the approving for just a few people so don't swamp just those those couple of people but did you really invoices but have a good software I have a good process to to cover that thank you sorry yeah I don't one place let's take a look at some of the survey day look at the demographics now let's kind of jump in and look at the survey data here so we asked respondents how valuable of eighty to the greater organization and the results were overwhelmingly positive a majority 58 percent ta P at least very valuable or exceptionally valuable and you know fully ninety-four percent saw ap as very valuable the perception of eighty to the greater organization is very valuable that's significant I've been doing these surveys for quite a while now and I'll tell you a few years ago ApS perception to the greater organization if you ask them in eighty what they thought others thought about their department they didn't think it was very valuable so that's been a seismic shift if you will so it's great that ap is starting to get some of the attention in the organizations being viewed much more favorably in the organization that's good why is that good because when you need to go back to get investments to get money to get more people to get raises if someone thinks you're important those things are easier to obtain so it's great to see now if we take a look here as I mentioned early we're going to compare some of the data from dynamic survey that we had to the state of the Payable survey that we've done for the past fourteen years we wanted to compare how the perception of AP in the dynamics world compared to the perception of AP in the broader universe so what was interesting is AP seems to be need more valuable in dynamics environment than in the greater universe while it is not sure ah but it's good to see that in the dynamics world ap is perceived and appreciated better than in the broader broader spectrum of the rest of AP users out there so let's take a look now at a invoice receipt level as you can see here invoice automation the invoice receipt level is very low with almost 2/3 being manual with limited automation only 15% of our respondents we're very are fully automated this leads us to believe that there's a need that automation could address here most of the processes are manual does that mean that invoices are coming in from suppliers they're being mailed physically they're being received as we open they have to be scammed copied etc so it's a very manual process very tactical process that's going on here so that was interesting result of the survey then we took a look at how that data from that invoice got into the system was that a manual that an automated process once again data entry is rampant throughout the dynamics community almost 75 percent said they had limited automation of data entry arm you know this typically goes hand in hand with invoice receipt data that we saw in the previous slide the majority of dynamics customers are struggling with the manual receipt and entered invoice data into the Dynamics ERP this is an opportunity for automation to lend a hand and kind of turn the tables here so if you are manually receiving and entering data within the ERP there's an opportunity to automate and explore automation for that now let's take a look at the PIO matching level here and I know out there some of you are highly purchase order driven and some of you or less purchase order driven so really depends some what I'm maturity to business the nature of your business if you're dealing with more indirect purchases and invoices you're probably going to be less Pio based if you're more direct purchases your problem we're manufacturing probably have more POS here so you know once again taking a look at the data here a lot of manual processing is taking place in the dynamics world forty five percent so almost half is completely manual um so the PIO matching and for those of you are not familiar with Pio matching you know I want to take a step back and you know peel matching is when you have an invoice that comes in and you have a purchase order that was used to generate that or to that good being purchased and then being shipped so peel matching is matching an invoice to the purchase order to make sure the data compares to the two of them if that's referred to as a two-way match we can get into a three-way match which is invoice to po-2 goods received etc just want to make sure I clarified that but what we can see here is that very manual process we're continuing the trend here the delivery of the invoice of the manual the entry of the invoice is a manual any Pio matching is extremely manual as well so there's a there's a trend that we're starting to see here so when we take a look at you know we asked how automated these organizations were from really an approval process so the approval of the invoice once the data came in I was entered into the system how is it routed around for approval how automated was that process here we can see that from the data here third of all companies are manually approving and routing invoices only twenty four percent say they're dairy or wholly automated so that means in the dynamics world it's still very manual this goes hand in hand with building on the trend that we saw here from the receipt to the entry to the matching to the approvals it's still a very manual process that's going on throughout the dynamics world so we asked automated respondents where from a reporting and analytics perspective and interestingly this is kind of where we saw a market difference from manual pass to a much more automated one so we can see here that almost what 70% people reported that they are extending 60% 65% said that we're putting an analytics automation level is much higher they're very automated a fully automated harshly automated so we're seeing a greater instance a lot of Mason when it comes to reporting and analytics we tried to decipher why this was why this was in contrast to some of the data that we saw on the other responses and when we came up with was there's probably reporting that may be used within the Dynamics ERP that's being leveraged within the AP automation process to a greater extent than some of the other functionalities being leveraged there so it's just kind of interesting result that was there and of course I mentioned this a little bit earlier you know all you know not all invoices but majority and invoices come with some kind of early payment discount opportunity so we asked respondents how many were taking early payment discounts and what was the level of automation when it came to that so once again we get back to a very manual labor intensive process that was here we see that 42% are completely manual when it came to taking discounts which probably translates to that a lot of these discounts aren't getting taken because the time to approve the invoice routed around is entered in the system it's so time-consuming that by the time that the invoice is ready for payment the early payment discount option that was available has probably passed by and hopefully you're not at the other side of the spectrum where you're now facing a late payment fee it's after the fact so early payment discount capture is extremely manual and the reason for this maybe is due to the maturity level of 80 automation within the dynamics world that this is just not a focus area for many companies in the dynamics world and this could be because so many are manual that they're struggling just to get invoices approved let alone capturing discounts they're entitled to but not taking advantage of so then we asked how many of the respondents were using third-party ap automation solutions and about 1/4 of the respondents said they had a third-party solution in addition to the functionality within the Dynamics ERP that they were leveraging for AP automation once again when we take a look at data that ardent surveys from the greater universe of ERPs and users out there we we usually find a much higher instance of third party API automation solutions being utilized so once again this goes to kind of the maturity level of dynamics market versus the broader market that's out there and as Dynamics customers and the market matures we expect to see this level of we use third-party automation solutions increase significantly so now this this is kind of summation of what we just saw all the other previous slides that we just put together and I put it here you know for reason it kind of gives us one snapshot of everything that's going on we take a look at the level of automation across the board this is the average of all those numbers that I showed in the previous five or six slides here and we can see that across the board there is no particular task within the API automation or unity the AP process that is greater than partially automated so we're seeing that there's a you know the data told us is that it's still very manual very labor intensive with not a lot of automation leveraged by the respondents of this survey that's here so you know interesting and you know if you're a glass-half-full person or a glass-half-empty person if you're a glass-half-full person you look at the data and say wow is a great opportunity to automate a P and take advantage of functionality and software solutions that are out there to help improve the process and that's kind of the way I look at this data here is okay where it's not as mature market as some of the other markets out there and that's a great opportunity because we can help so many companies with AP automation to take the next step and then finally we took a look at the time to process an invoice here and we can see that you know what's alarming is if you look at the right hand side of the screen here you know over 25 percent of organizations out there can't measure don't measure because it's not a priority or just don't know what's going on and that speaks to the level of maturity that companies are still very manual they have no idea how long it takes to process and invoice and you know we can see that from the data the results that are here as well so now we're going to move on to the top three challenges with in accounts payable so we asked we gave the respondents about 10 different 15 different categories to choose from saying you know what are your top three challenges within accounts payable and what we're looking at here are the top three challenges the top three responses that we saw here I know there's four on the screen because these are the top four responses to what are your top three challenges a little confusing matter here you know what we're looking at here you know it says you know from the data that time is more important than cost um you know we usually have cost in the top four and frequent number one you know we look at the broader data that's here you know this means that people are focusing more on the tactical side of Defense rather than the strategic side they're just struggling as the data showed very manual we're seeing way too much paper in the environment things take too long to get approved to have new visibility and why do you have no visibility if you're receiving paper and you're waiting at her to the input there's no way you can run a report on one of my outstanding liabilities what about unrecorded liabilities how many invoices though I haven't glow what's the average time to process an invoice we can't actually start getting to the strategic data the strategic aspect of accounts payable because we're stuck in the tactical side and that's what we're seeing here within the dynamics world there's you know visibility is a big problem because it's too much paper and too much paper has ramifications on the entire process with lack of props lack of visibility and time to processing or two of the larger ones and then you know what I also wanted to point out too is the last one we're seeing here is you know 28 percent of the respondents said that getting budget to invest in automation is a challenge so I know honors been quiet for a little while here I thought I'd ask for a question as to why do you think we're seeing that 28% of respondents are seeing a difficulty getting budget for the automation projects well I think it's usually that well know when people are going to do 365 there is already been hassle that you've just gone through the project you you you've just completed the European then you have realized the problems that you're having with with the AP pond and you would need to get that back budget again an install new project to get get that going but so those are for example or kind of one of the reasons and there is also that pain of actually actually going forward with another another project but to get the budget you just need to give that business case of the return of investment and the creating of value when you are providing a better more flex civil service to your customers and providing an efficient process to your your employees so the manual process can scale only by increasing more personnel when automated process will only get better over time so as you're hedging against getting more staff you're also increasing the productivity and quality of work and the overall overall value added by the existing personnel by investing to automation salon one of the things that you touched on there was organizations upgrading to Dynamics 365 is it possible for companies to upgrade to Dynamics 365 while at the same time automating their accounts payable process or they mutually exclusive I think that is it's very good idea to do them in the same time so you don't first learn to do one way and then change the whole process possibly it doesn't have to change the process but if there is substantial changes on how the people the business people who don't are that into the finance processes how they have to learn new things in a short period of time again and again I think you could say save their their comprehensive ascent and to do that as a one single project ok great so then we took a look at most impaired the responses from Dynamics to the broader arted responses to the same question from this past year and here we can see that the responses are a little bit different as far as the frequency that we're seeing these responses come through here we're dealing with exceptions being the largest challenge and what does that mean exceptions mean that you have you've automated your process in dealing with shooting the invoice is that for one reason or another are kicked out of the approval process because something doesn't match something's out of Tolerance whatever it may be that usually is more indicative of a an organization that has already automated and it's kind of moved down maturity curve that's their the same thing for the invoice payment approvals taking too long you know we're seeing the similar response in both sides defense in the ardent side as well as the dynamic side here and I think that's good because people want to measure the process how long it's taking it's a great KPI you're not doing it already to understand what the cost of an invoice is but also how long it takes to get an invoice approved from receipt all the way through payment so it's something that's you know very important to take a look at there so let's move on here and compare the two of these side-by-side so top three challenges from dynamics versus ardent here you know what we can see here is you know dynamics dealing with much more tactical issues whereas the ardent responses are more strategic Arden respondents report to almost 25 less challenges with paper versus dynamic respondents lack of visibility and getting budget a much more tactical and don't appear on the Arden top floor and yet they do on the dynamic side of the fence there as I said before interestingly both respondents or respondents to both surveys still feel like approval and payment times take too long and like I said that's good that means that people aren't satisfied they continually want to work to reduce the amount of time and why do you want to reduce the amount of time because once an invoice comes in to the time when is ready for payment it opens up the opportunity to receive those discounts to start leveraging working capital management tactics in order to increase the return of the overall organization we talked a little bit about getting budget there it doesn't show up on the orden side so I mentioned it's a little bit that's a more of a tactical challenge and a strategic challenge that we see there's one of the one of the big differences between the two so dynamics we're seeing much more tactical focused responses whereas in the art the broader survey we're seeing a little bit more mature organizations when it comes to API automation and they're their top challenges tend to be a little bit more strategic exactly those figures reflect actually the answers about the manual process and I sometimes use a graph that shows the maturity of your review process like you just said about the maturity level so these problems that are listed as the key pain points for dynamics users are unfortunately the paint's that are on the lowest step on the maturity if we joke about having an eight-piece maithili rocky of needs the first need to read to reach is visibility and the visibility is gained by getting rid of the paper getting rid of paper affects so many parts of the process and the value danish is just substantial and the visibility doesn't mean only the inverse pictures and data what the process causes as well so how much does your purchase-to-pay process cost to your company how accurate is any cost that there is in with the KPIs that we have so commit the main points of the rest of the world you need to achieve a certain level of maturity for your ap process to move on to worrying worrying about these efficiency factors and savings and analytics and strategic actions yep and I really talked about number of times we talk about maturity level of organizations and when organizations are smaller and growing they tend to start off the manual process and as they grow and mature they tend to find ways to automate these processes so what we're seeing is in line with what would expect to see especially from the dynamic community which is very manual and tactical in that many these organizations in the survey are smaller or newer some of them have the critical mass required to automate ap others are approaching that so as we move from smaller organizations to larger organizations you know anybody with kids out there know you know those are saying you have small kids you have small problems you have big kids you have bigger problems so kind of bringing that back to AP you know you can handle 20 invoices a monk and paper format I still have visibility into it although not great but when you're dealing with 2,000 invoices a month or 5,000 or 10,000 invoices from on three even greater it's impossible really to be in control of the process you're really just trying to survive when you're doing everything manually as many organizations are so that's why you know if we expect to see those and smaller organizations but as they would share companies realize it's not a tenable situation and they go from there okay so let's move on here for the second time the next question we asked was what the AP organization's top priorities are so first we asked like what are the challenges the problems that they're facing with it well they're facing now we're going to go to okay so what are the organization's priorities what are they looking to do going forward here so great news here is what we like here is that the data is very insightful here what we can see that what are the dynamics customers priorities here eliminating people reducing manual tasks you know what do they say that the first step in solving a problem is really that you have a problem so one out of every two respondents here said that they have too much paper and that's a big issue for them so that's great news that people are thinking along the right line they realize this isn't tenable anymore we're struggling to keep up and as our company grows it's only going to get worse so we need to figure out a solution so that's great I need to figure out how to eliminate the table and reduce those manual tasks and at hand with that 43% said we're looking to implement an API automation solution in 2019 so they're not just saying we have too much paper that's our biggest priority getting rid of the paper they say we knew that we need an AP automation solution to help us address all that paper and all those manual tasks that we're doing here as I mentioned and I've mentioned throughout the presentation here improving visibility is a top priority organizations can't thrive if they don't know what's going on behind the scenes visibility into invoice data and payment data is critical you need to understand who your suppliers are who you're paying how much are you paying too much are they charging you too much any kind of spend analysis that you want to do is critical to the future success and profitability of your organization so you need to have that visibility within the AP Department and it's something that's been overlooked for far too long so we're happy to see that organizations are starting to think along those lines get rid of the paper automate and improve visibility so I think you know ap departments in the dynamics world are looking and thinking about the right things that are here so we took a look here once again at the top three priorities from a dynamic survey against the priority top priorities from the ardent survey here and we can see a market difference between the two once again the dynamics priorities tend to be more tactical in nature whereas the respondents from the ardent survey are much more evenly spread out as far as evening as the answers go and tend to be a little bit more on the strategic side of the fence they're you know honor you were a controller you've been in the AP automation space for quite some time now what do you make of these differences between the dynamics and the origin survey respondents I think that these are again reflecting exactly what we saw before so as we're going to we're going to answer to the pain pains in the previous slides by Lemony eliminating the paper with with again with the rest of the world these are a bit more matured goals with which to reach and I think that with the dynamics part I think that for example that's why do rap and other AAP solutions are in them in the market to help dynamics companies to to get over these challenges yep I agree that you know there's a correlation between typically the number of vendors in a space and the size of the problem and so if that holds true with AP automation the dynamics world there's a lot of opportunities a lot of organizations that are very tactical that can benefit from automation because there's a lot of attention being paid to this area within the space currently and we're seeing more and more every day so let's take a look at some of the key takeaways we took a step back from the data I wanted to provide you you know with some kind of insights into this at a higher level here so what we saw with 75% of the market is not using an API automation solution that's very very interesting and kind of ties back to what we talked about at nauseam here with maturity in the market as the dynamics market matures as more people convert from older operating systems to 365 I think we'll see this dramatically shift going on here the dynamics market is very tactically focused so if you're out there and you Eve nodded your head at some of these responses that we have too much paper we have lasted there's ability it takes too long to process an invoice and you're wondering how you stack up to others in your environment you can see that you know you're not far behind or you know the outlier when it comes to the autumn Bayesian process here so there there's an opportunity for you to take some action and kind of change that um get rid of that paper-based manual lack of visibility approach that you have and kind of start looking for ways to eliminate all of those manual processes and move to a little bit more strategic opportunity and it also indicates that there's you know an opportunity to augment the dynamics functionality sometimes and one of the considerations going into the survey where do our people leveraging the functionality within AX 2012 or 365 to automate APA and we can see overwhelmingly from the data the answer is no that functionality doesn't exist within arm dynamics and people are looking either not doing anything about it currently a very manual tactical lever intensively talked about or they're leveraging some outside data outside solutions excuse me to help automate the process there so that was very interesting and then finally kind of the key takeaways you know from the data nearly sixty percent I thought eighty is very valuable but only 25 percent have done anything about it so you know it's it's worth you know taking your step back and looking at that and that the data that we saw there so people realize that there's a problem they know that ap is very valuable and they know there's better ways to do things for ap to improve the value that it adds to the organization so if you're sitting on the sidelines you know now that might be a great opportunity to start exploring how you can go away from those tactical manual based activities that you're doing to a more automated environment where you can start adding more value to the organization so now we we always like to end our presentations of this sort with some strategies we don't want to just present the data we want to you know provide you with some information kind of a roadmap going forward so we put together some students here but you can take a look at first and foremost it's important to take a step back and to take a look at your AP operations understand what you're doing today you know identify the key performance metrics we talked about and we have a list of anybody you know once we can share them with you you know what some of the key ones are the cost to process and invoice the time to process an invoice the amount of invoice is being received in paper versus electronic format the amount of payments made electronically the cost to process a payment the number of exceptions that you're handling so we have you know 10 or 15 key indicators that are a good way to start measuring how you're doing in accounts payable and then work against those because if you don't know where you are anyroad is going to get you there so once you start measuring once you draw that line in the sand say okay we understand it cost us X dollars or F zeros to process and invoice today we're going to take a look at this tomorrow and/or tomorrow to be down the road and say okay we're going to analyze this again yeah has it gotten better and if so by how much you know when you want to go back and get more budget for AP to give raises to people that deserve it to invest more in software you need to have some data to present to management to that controller to that CFO that shows them that you're making progress so the next step is and I came into this previously is identify areas of weakness not handled by the ERP too often you know I've seen cases where management thinks we bought this ERP this and it does everything but the reality is it doesn't do everything and it doesn't do everything well necessarily does a lot of things really great there's no doubt about that but an ERP does not do everything and anything exceptionally well so I did know identify areas of weakness not handled by the ERP and look to augment those with other technology you know as our data showed AP automation solutions can help augment some of the weaknesses within the dynamics offering that there and it's not system of any gear pieces them like I said they can't do everything can't do everything well that's why there's third-party solutions out there for all different sorts of areas so understand what the erp does well and then be prepared to present that to management as well because they're going to thank we but we spent umpteen hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars on this ERP system why can't we use this and the answer is well it really does this well and that's why we bought it but not so much you know it comes to AP automation next idea next strategy is collaborate with the other departments whether you want to think of AP in this manner or not but really AP is providing a service to the rest of the organization so understand what the rest of the organization is looking for when it comes to AP delivering value to them talk to IT talk to procurement talk to finance the business units understand what can help make their jobs easier what data they're looking for you know are their suppliers frustrated because you know our procurement suppliers frustrated because they're getting paid late and then when a supplier gets paid late what happens they call it and usually it's the person that purchased the good or service and ask me where the payment isn't and then necessitates a call to AP so talk to them find out what their challenges are you're going to find out a lot of it can be solved by automating accounts payable you just need to address this and some of that maybe you'd be able to do today you just weren't aware so talk to the other departments that really you're servicing and are clients of AP let's develop a roadmap for aligning AP with the goals of the greater enterprise you know too often I've seen ApS Bartman's kind of just do their own thing and just think we just receive invoices and we just pay them they don't look into the broader strategy of what the greater organization is looking to do and working to accomplish if you want to achieve real strategic value and really move up the value chain within the organization have a team viewed differently and not just some department that pays bills aligned yourself with the goals of the greater organization try to figure out what those goals are and how you can add value to its increasing profitability there at a peak and increase the return on money take a look at those with lots of different ways if you have happier suppliers guess what you have happier suppliers are more likely to deal with you give you most favored nation give you better prices take care of you accept your provide you with innovations so ap can have a huge impact on the rest of the organization you just need to align yourself with what the company is trying to do and then finally this is me on my soapbox which I often do here ap adds tremendous value to the organization however in my career most often I found that ap does a horrible job when it comes to communicating their success and accomplishments for the rest of the organization for whatever reason they don't share that with anybody and that needs to change if you're going to get more money for your people if you're going to show the value that you're adding to the organization if you're going to change the perception and you know it's a tie now let's keep that high and they can even hire you need to show the value that you're having and providing to the organization so communicate your wins to the organization whether it's a monthly newsletter or presenting a management team meeting whatever it may be make sure you're talking about here's ap here's how all the great things that come with include improved supplier collaboration we've improved working capital management we've reduced the cost of process and invoice we've improved this ability all these things are critical and if you talk the language of the people at the other end of the table the CFO what's his he wants to maximize value to the shareholders he wants to maximize profitability organization show them how ap is contributing to that they're going to start to listen you're going to start to get a seat at the table so ap doing a lot of great things with automation it can move that needle even further but don't be shy about communicating that with the rest of the organization those are my five strategy to success on I don't know if you've anything to add on top of that at this point very good how you covered it I'm focusing on the identified areas of weaknesses as the survey results do show us that dynamic organizations are struggling with the same kind of problems with the same kind of weaknesses and then the rest of the world is not so I think that that is a thing that is solvable without a doubt I mean there's there there's weaknesses and there's third-party solutions that can help address those and help organizations do it they shouldn't get frustrated that the ERP doesn't solve those um there's a reason why there's third-party solutions out there you know there's tens of thousands of them you know in all walks of life not just a P the reason being that your P do something was exceptionally well but as others that you know they don't do as well and that's why there's other vendors to fill the holes that are there with respect to time here on let's get to our Q&A section so I'm going to turn it back over to Jason who is our moderator and let him take it from here all right thank you Bob if you have questions please do enter them into the Q&A block you should see just to the right of a main presentation area there we have a few already and we're happy to take yours too so the first question that came in a bit earlier was asking whether you would make ap automation and ap project or an IT project I can answer best while well this needs bunches and ownership may may usually be AP driven IDE also does have a role to play and actually responsibilities to do IT have to ensure that the selected solutions and processes and upgrades are aligned with your IT strategy and exit existing infrastructure so don't do a project without an IP or vice-versa you might run into unfortunate surprises yeah kind of adding to an honor has to stay there you know 80 is going to lead the charge for the automation project however IT is involved any a project however you know what I'm seeing more and more especially open solutions like do up the amount of work required by IT is getting less and less as time goes on the systems are much more automated so really IT is providing access to the ERP as opposed to requiring huge amounts of work that on their behalf so whereas before certain projects were pushed to the back of the line because we don't have the time or resources IT would say now the solutions for 80 have mitigated the amount of work that IT need to do and it's really just providing them with access and a minimal amount of work that needs to get done so it's really getting them on board explaining to them like this is a project that we can do requires this much work from you so while it's an AP driven project you do need to collaborate with IT and like I mentioned before it's before you start a project collaborate with the other departments to find out what procurement wants find out what other departments work I want so when you implement this it's not a solution that just solved ApS need it's something that gets broad approval across the board all right someone would like to know I think on an annual basis how many invoices would a company need to process before automation becomes worthwhile I think that note well previously I was saying that rule of thumb that usually 10,000 is something we say but depending on the situation you might need to start earlier or even later so the employee or actually approver amounts the diversity of your invoicing the the size of your invoices is is also has an effects not just not just the volume of the invoices but in general ten thousand would be simply the amount sure it's kind of adding what on a said they're you know we find that the you automate AP that's better and 10,000 is a good starting point I've seen organizations with a thousand invoices automated 80 senior organizations open manual much passed by 10,000 number but as we talked about through this presentation when you automate there's so much more that comes with it you have that visibility into what's going on in your organization you're enabling people to become less tactical and more strategic and add more value to the organization so 10,000 is a good line in the sand I've seen a thousand invoices you know I've seen you know 5,000 invoices really the early you get it done the better because as your company grows you're going to see the value increase incrementally alright someone would like to know the different levels of AP automation provided in Dynamics GP versus Dynamics 365 in specify which which seamus 465 product but if you could give any I suppose any comparison Elmo knows I'm unfortunate and we don't know the TV Guide side as well so I do know Dynamics d 365 side very well but but as I do have a lack of knowledge with the GP I can't on after that yes far as me differentiating between the two is probably a separate conversation to have a town that potentially somebody has ax 2012 or something along those lines and is thinking about migrating to 365 and now that's probably somewhat of a better question for your integration partner or Microsoft to tell you the differences between the two as far as functionality is concerned you know there's certain functionality such as invoice journals for non pio invoices or approval workflows for POS or purchase requisitions vendor collaboration mobile approvals things like that you know there's some differences between the two but it's probably a better question for Microsoft and they're the specific differences there is functionality within both you know that can be utilized as we mentioned before the reason why API donation is so tact within a dynamics world is that the functionality that's provided by Dynamics needs really to be augmented to achieve a real automation in the AP process all right well I'm see we are at the top of the hour here so I think we can begin to wrap up let me make one final call for any additional questions we've recorded today's event be sharing additional details the future but let me just say to Bob and Donna both of you thank you so much for presenting today for sharing all this to do with us thank you - thanks Jason good day everybody and with that we will conclude today's event have a nice day everyone you