Why accounts payable is the process worth automating first

Every business runs an accounts payable process, whether or not anyone calls it that. It is one of the most important functions in a finance team and one of the hardest to make better, because the work is spread thinly across a lot of small transactions rather than concentrated somewhere you can see it.

Why it resists improvement

Nobody sets aside a day to fix accounts payable, because on any given day it is not broken — it is just slow. The cost is spread across hundreds of five-minute tasks, so it never presents as a problem large enough to schedule. Meanwhile the volume grows with the business.

What you get back

• Capacity — the same team handles more invoices without more hours.
• Lower labour cost per invoice — the cost stops scaling with the number of lines on the document.
• Digitised documents — searchable and retrievable, rather than filed somewhere and hoped for.
• Access from anywhere — the person approving a bill does not need to be near the paper.

How the capture works

Cosmic Bills starts by capturing invoice data in a digital format. It reads the document using optical character recognition, applies a trained model to work out which values are the supplier, the dates, the totals, the tax and the individual lines, and applies whatever supplier and product mapping you have configured. You then see the result next to the original document, correct anything that is wrong, and approve.