Transcepta : Global e-Invoicing with Dynamic Discounting Support

Transcepta is an eleven year old company that provides a global supplier network for fast supplier on-boarding and e-Invoicing. Whereas many supplier networks are setup for supplier discovery, and most support e-Invoicing, not many are set-up for straight-through processing and industry-leading auto-match capability.

In addition, most of the solutions that support e-Invoicing are limited in terms of the way invoices get into the system and many can only support invoices through the portal, delivered in a specific XML standard, or pushed into the ERP system the network is integrated with. For mid-size operations, this is typically good enough, but when you work for an organization that has a very large supplier base with thousands (or tens of thousands) of suppliers that use a dozen or more different formats (PDF, virtual printers, EDI, XML, cXML, Oracle Network, etc.), it typically ends up being the case that only 60% to 80% of invoices flow through the e-Procurement application automatically and the rest have to be manually entered or converted through OCR, which just adds more invoices to the exception queue for manual review. That’s where network-based e-Invoice automation solutions come in, and the best ones can easily plug-in to your current infrastructure (through the ERP). Transcepta is no exception to this rule.

Transcepta, recognizing that if you want to achieve a maximal throughput through an e-Invoicing platform, you have to support all of the standard formats used throughout your supply base, has built a platform that not only supports just about every EDI and (c)XML format that you can think of, but also supports Oracle validate integration, virtual printer drivers (that print direct to the platform, which was not a common feature of network platforms when Transcepta first offered this capability), and advanced PDF processing capability. If the invoice PDF is created from QuickBooks (or other supported standard accounting applications), the Transcepta platform will dissect and extract the electronic properties of the PDF to obtain as much information as possible about the supplier, associated purchase order or contract, and items being billed to automatically identify the supplier (from a standard database, such as D&B), and the purchase order in the organization’s ERP.

The strength of the platform lies in it’s advanced auto-match capability. It’s a reasonably well known statistic that invoice error rates are in the 10% to 15% range. SI and SM have quoted multiple studies from Paystream, Aberdeen, etc. over the past few years that consistently report numbers in this range. As a result, most e-Invoice automation solutions will bounce 10% to 15% of invoices back to the supplier or to an AP clerk for review upon first submission. This is a rather high error rate when many of the exceptions are not a result from price or order receipt discrepancies (when the invoice should be bounced back to the supplier with a clear explanation of the necessary adjustments for [automatic] approval and payment) but from missing supplier, purchase order, or line item information that is available somewhere in the organization’s e-Procurement systems.

In their effort to increase straight-through processing, Transcepta has developed advanced PO cloud-match software that implements automated reasoning, statistical matching, and other “AI” technologies that allows the organization to upload every PO and relevant piece of supplier information for processing by an advanced matching algorithm that is able to evolve over time. Using this extra data in conjunction with advanced algorithms, Transcepta is able to match about 80% of invoices that are rejected by traditional matching algorithms. One customer that received 45K to 50K invoices a month saw an 85% improvement in straight through processing from this algorithm, going from an average initial reject rate of 15% to 2%. That’s a lot of man-hours on exception processing saved.

As hinted at in the introduction, Transcepta has a number of other strong capabilities in supplier on-boarding and dynamic discounting, and for more information on these, see the recent and upcoming pieces on Spend Matters Pro (membership required) by the doctor and the prophet.