Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Rob Reid, EVP of Sage Intacct (Part 5)

Rob Reid: I’m going to start with a very mundane area, and then we’ll go all the way to the incredible. Today, a lot of our customers still do some things the old way. If you’re an accounts payable accountant, you’ll probably divide up all the people you’re going to pay alphabetically. You’re going to pay A through M on Wednesdays and N through Z on Thursdays. It’s a very common practice.

We try to inject new thoughts, but that’s what a lot of people still do. With artificial intelligence, the system will be looking at, “With this particular invoice, we can get an additional 10% discount off of the invoice if we pay within 30 days. We’ll be going to that accounts payable clerk on a Monday and say, “Today is the 29^th day. If we go ahead and pay this invoice today, we can save 10%. I’ve already queued it. All you have to do is get approval and away it goes.”

The system will be keeping track of all the opportunities to improve cash flow and lower expenses. The accounts payable won’t have to remember what to do and when to do it.

Another area is, in most midsized organizations, they use audit firms. The audit firms send in five or six green beans from their firms. They will go through 10% to 15% of all the transactions to make sure that there’s consistency in performance against the requirements. They pull together a big report. They talk to the audit committee about it and then submit a very large bill.

In the future, what will happen is the system will go through and look at 100% of the transactions. It will come up with the exception report. It will also come up with how to mitigate the exception and then deliver a full audit committee report. All of that can be done in one day. Your auditors could still come in and validate the overall process, but your bill is going to be much lower, the amount of time is going to go away, and you’ll be able to focus more on managing the business than making sure that everything gets done right.

Sramana Mitra: You’re doing some sort of an automated audit process as an upsell module.

Rob Reid: Absolutely. Further into the future is the ability for the system to go through and identify, for example, the greatest opportunities for investing the next dollar. That’s where the power of AI is going to kick in. It’s not going to be a lot of judgment calls. The system will be able to tell you the best place and why.

Even though cloud financial management solutions are so much better than what we had with client servers, we’re going to look back and say what we’re doing today is mundane. In three to five years, there’s going to be an exponential change in the way finance works to support the business and making the right decisions.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Rob Reid, EVP of Sage Intacct
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