Context

AI Accounts Payable Triage

Organizations receive thousands of emails per month in an AP email inbox. Typically, these inboxes are manually sorted, triaged, and managed by a team of AP clerks, resulting in many inefficiencies and errors.

By using Symphona’s automation and AI capabilities to optimize various processes within AP, your organization can automatically manage low-priority items, flag high-priority payables, and automatically assign a ticket for an AP clerk to manage, saving your team time, money, and manpower. 

Symphona can help optimize in the following areas: 

Collecting all emails 

If you have a limited team of AP clerks manually reviewing inboxes with high email volume, your team is guaranteed to miss some important messages – which means upsetting payment requesters who are waiting for your quick reply. Symphona can help ensure an email is never missed. 

Identifying and dealing with irrelevant emails

Many AP email requests are either intended for other teams or include simple queries that can be answered by an existing knowledge base (e.g. an FAQ, website and project information, etc.). 

It’s a waste of your team’s time to go through these and send a response when they should be focusing on high-priority AP requests. Symphona can help automatically deal with these emails so your team doesn’t have to. 

A lack of built-in task management tools and operational metrics

Without well-designed task management tools, AP teams are even more prone to duplicate tasks and  miss important action items. Without metrics, team managers cannot make meaningful process changes.

Solution

How Symphona Helps 

AP triage processes are an excellent use case for automation using Symphona. Your organization can leverage our no-code tools of intelligent virtual agents (IVAs), robotic process automation (RPA), and generative AI to automate email capture, categorization, and service ticketing so that your AP team has more capacity to focus on the most important payable items.

Here’s an example of how our AP Inbox Management & Automation Solution works:

1. Emails sent to the AP inbox are forwarded to the SimplyAsk Platform (via simple email address forwarding)
2. Our AI categorizes your emails into some number of categories
3. Based on the category, either:some text
   1. An intelligent auto-reply is sent to the sender (using generative AI with the company’s existing knowledge base), or;
   2. Serve creates a service ticket with the email contents (text and attachments) for an AP Clerk to work on
4. The AP team can easily track and manage follow-up tasks and prioritization to optimize the AP process

Organizations can orchestrate the entire AP triage process using advanced workflow automation capabilities. Flow can navigate the contents of every email in an inbox, determine whether it can or cannot reply based on RPA flags, use generative AI to send intelligent auto-replies for simple queries, and connect with Serve to create service tickets for more complex action items.Flow can integrate with existing internal and third-party systems via API, providing your team flexibility with how you use it alongside your current technical stack.

For any errors in workflow automation, Resolve can manage and automatically triage any business exceptions (fallouts). Resolve integrates tightly Flow with to reduce exception resolution effort and help your organization focus more on your core mission.

For managing service tickets with ease,allows for automatic task management and follow up tasks with minimal configuration. By integrating it with Flow, teams can use the smart assignment tool, ensuring that AP clerks are automatically assigned tasks based on their urgency and complexity. By automating this process, AP clerks can focus their time on high-priority AP items.   

Alongside Flow, Resolve, and Serve, Symphona offers many other powerful features in the platform, including automatic email report generation and advanced dashboards for KPI tracking.

All Symphona tools are no-code, allowing both technical and non-technical team members to use prebuilt templates or our drag-and-drop functionality to easily design and modify workflows.

Overall, by using Symphona to automate your AP items, your company can save time, money, and effort on a flexible workflow automation solution that integrates with your current technical stack and helps your team ensure they’re on top of every AP request.