PredictAP, Inc., the leading AI-powered invoice coding solution designed specifically for the real estate industry, announced today a successful go live at Vantage Data Centers, a leading global provider of hyperscale data center campuses.
The finance team at Vantage selected PredictAP to reduce the burden of manual data entry on the existing accounts payable staff while continuing their global expansion.
“Our invoice volumes will increase rapidly as we grow, and I needed a way to scale our AP team’s capacity without hiring more staff solely for data entry,” said Jonathan Walker, senior director of accounting and controller at Vantage. He added “PredictAP significantly reduces the manual work, so my small team can be more efficient and effective, and I can focus them on higher value work.”
While commercial and industrial real estate leaders have largely automated accounts payable approval workflows, the complex invoice coding required for payment has remained an inefficient and mostly manual process.
The complexity of coding invoices is unique to commercial real estate, and poses a challenge when onboarding and training new hires.
PredictAP founder David Stifter explained the AP scaling challenge is a common one. “AP teams that need to handle more invoice volume are realizing that hiring more people often magnifies any inefficiencies rather than helping,” he said.
“This is a deceptively difficult problem with a lot of institutional knowledge required to fully code invoices. We’ve seen a growing frustration with tools that promise to streamline invoice processing but then leave the real problem, coding, to the AP team. Having PredictAP augment the Vantage AP team has enabled them to handle the firm’s impressive growth and the invoice volume that comes with that.
PredictAP combines state-of-the-art optical character recognition (OCR) technology with a proprietary machine learning algorithm to capture incoming invoice data and use historical examples to automatically add codes that today are mostly typed in by a company’s in-house AP staff.
An AP specialist can review the invoice coded by PredictAP and make changes, if needed, and submit it to their existing AP automation system, such as Yardi Payscan or Nexus Systems, for final review and approval. With a two-way data sync in place, any invoice data that needs updating is pulled from the system of record for easy edits, eliminating the need for manual data entry.
