Workflows & Automation

39 terms

1. 01 AI Trust, Analytics & Detection

   Accountable AI

   Accountable AI refers to AI systems built so their decisions can be explained, audited, and traced back to a specific action and reason, rather than operating as a black box that produces an output without a visible reasoning trail.

2. 02 Agentic & Autonomous Accounting

   Agentic Accounting

   Agentic accounting is the practice of running core finance processes, coding, matching, reconciling, approving, closing, through AI agents instead of manual steps or static rules.

3. 03 Agentic & Autonomous Accounting

   Agents

   An AI agent is software that can understand a goal stated in plain language, decide what steps are needed to reach it, and carry those steps out without a human doing each one by hand.

4. 04 AI Trust, Analytics & Detection

   AI Accountant

   An AI accountant is software that performs accounting tasks, coding transactions, reconciling accounts, preparing reports, that would otherwise require a person with accounting training, working alongside the finance team rather than replacing the function entirely.

5. 05 Core AI Technology

   AI Algorithm

   An AI algorithm is the set of rules and calculations an AI system uses to analyze data, recognize patterns, and produce a decision or output.

6. 06 AI Trust, Analytics & Detection

   AI Assistant

   An AI assistant is a conversational AI tool that helps a finance team member with day-to-day tasks: answering a question about the numbers, drafting a report, surfacing an anomaly, generally in response to a direct request rather than running a process autonomously.

7. 07 Process Automation

   AI Integration

   AI integration is the work of incorporating AI capabilities, document understanding, agents, predictive models, into a company's existing financial systems and processes, rather than running the AI as a separate tool alongside them.

8. 08 Process Automation

   Approval Flow

   An approval flow is the sequence of reviews and sign-offs an invoice, expense, or journal entry passes through before it's paid or posted, typically routed by amount, department, or vendor.

9. 09 Core AI Technology

   Artificial Intelligence (AI)

   Artificial intelligence is software that performs tasks which have historically required human judgment: reading a document, recognizing a pattern, deciding what to do next.

10. 10 Agentic & Autonomous Accounting

    Autonomous Accounting

    Autonomous accounting is the practice of running accounting processes, coding, matching, reconciling, closing, end to end through AI, without a person carrying out each step by hand.

11. 11 Agentic & Autonomous Accounting

    Autonomous Finance

    Autonomous finance describes a finance function where AI agents run the operational work, transaction processing, reconciliation, reporting, compliance checks, continuously and without manual handoffs, while people set policy, review exceptions that genuinely need judgment, and make the calls that shape the business.

12. 12 Agentic & Autonomous Accounting

    Autonomous Invoice Processing

    Autonomous invoice processing is the end-to-end handling of an invoice, receipt, data extraction, coding, matching against a purchase order or receipt, routing for approval, and posting, carried out by AI rather than a person moving the invoice through each stage manually.

13. 13 Agentic & Autonomous Accounting

    Autonomous PO Matching

    Autonomous PO matching is the automated verification that an invoice's line items, quantities, and pricing align with the corresponding purchase order and, where relevant, the goods-receipt record, carried out without a person manually checking each document against the others.

14. 14 Agentic & Autonomous Accounting

    Autonomous Reconciliation

    Autonomous reconciliation is matching transactions, such as bank statement lines to ledger entries, invoices to payments, or intercompany balances, automatically and continuously, with a person involved only when something genuinely doesn't match.

15. 15 Agentic & Autonomous Accounting

    Command Interface

    A command interface, in accounting software, is a way of directing work by describing what needs to happen in plain language, rather than navigating menus, forms, and configuration screens to get there.

16. 16 Process Automation

    Compliance Automation

    Compliance automation is the use of technology to ensure financial processes consistently follow regulatory requirements and internal policy, flagging or blocking transactions that fall outside them, rather than relying on manual review to catch violations after the fact.

17. 17 Process Automation

    Data Extraction

    Data extraction is the process of pulling specific pieces of information, an amount, a vendor name, a due date, a line item, out of a document or system and converting them into structured, usable data.

18. 18 AI Trust, Analytics & Detection

    Duplicate Payments

    Duplicate payments occur when the same invoice is paid more than once, often because it entered the system twice under slightly different references, or because a payment was issued before an earlier one had been recorded as complete.

19. 19 AI Trust, Analytics & Detection

    Early Payment Discounts

    Early payment discounts are terms a vendor offers, for example 2% off if an invoice is paid within ten days instead of thirty, as an incentive for the buyer to settle early.

20. 20 Process Automation

    End-to-End Processing

    End-to-end processing refers to automating a complete workflow, from the moment an invoice or transaction enters the system to the moment it's fully resolved, paid, posted, reconciled, rather than automating one stage and leaving the rest manual.

21. 21 Process Automation

    Enterprise Resource Planning System (ERP System)

    An integrated software platform that manages core business processes, including accounting, procurement, project management, risk management, and supply chain operations.

22. 22 Process Automation

    ERP Integration

    ERP integration is the connection between an enterprise resource planning system and other software, an AI accounting layer, a bill-pay tool, a reporting platform, so that data moves between them without manual export and re-entry.

23. 23 AI Trust, Analytics & Detection

    Fraud Detection

    Fraud detection is the use of AI and rules-based systems to identify suspicious patterns in financial transactions, a duplicate invoice, an unusual payment destination, an amount just under an approval threshold, before a payment goes out.

24. 24 Core AI Technology

    Generative AI

    Generative AI refers to models that produce new content, text, summaries, forecasts, draft communications, based on patterns learned from existing data, rather than retrieving a pre-written answer.

25. 25 Process Automation

    Invoice Coding

    Invoice coding is the assignment of the correct general ledger account, cost center, and other classification fields to each line item on an invoice, so the expense lands in the right place in the financial statements.

26. 26 Process Automation

    Invoice Ingestion

    Invoice ingestion is the process of receiving an invoice into an accounting or AP system, however it arrives: email, PDF upload, EDI feed, vendor portal, and converting it into structured, usable data.

27. 27 Process Automation

    Invoice Processing

    Invoice processing covers everything that happens to an invoice between arrival and payment: receipt, data extraction, coding to the right account, matching against a purchase order or receipt, approval routing, and posting to the ledger.

28. 28 Process Automation

    Invoice Processing Automation

    Invoice processing automation is the use of AI and related technology to handle invoice receipt, data extraction, validation, and approval routing without a person carrying out each step manually.

29. 29 Core AI Technology

    Large Language Model (LLM)

    A large language model (LLM) is an AI model trained on vast amounts of text that can understand and generate natural language, answer questions, summarize documents, and reason through multi-step instructions.

30. 30 Core AI Technology

    Machine Learning

    Machine learning is a branch of AI in which a system improves at a task by learning from data, rather than being explicitly programmed with rules for every case.

31. 31 Core AI Technology

    Natural Language Processing (NLP)

    Natural language processing is the branch of AI that lets a system read and interpret human language, in a document, an email, a chat message, and extract meaning from it.

32. 32 Process Automation

    No-Touch Processing

    No-touch processing describes an invoice or transaction that moves from receipt to posting without any person opening it, a system reads it, codes it, matches it, and posts it entirely on its own, reserving human review for the cases that genuinely need a judgment call.

33. 33 Core AI Technology

    Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

    Optical character recognition is the technology that converts an image of text, a scanned invoice, a photographed receipt, a PDF, into machine-readable data.

34. 34 Process Automation

    PO Matching

    PO matching is the process of checking that an invoice's details, price, quantity, item, agree with the corresponding purchase order, and often the goods-receipt record as well, before the invoice is approved for payment.

35. 35 AI Trust, Analytics & Detection

    Predictive Analytics

    Predictive analytics uses historical data and statistical or machine-learning models to forecast a future outcome: a customer's likely payment date, next quarter's cash position, the probability that an invoice is fraudulent.

36. 36 Core AI Technology

    Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

    Robotic process automation is software that mimics a person's clicks and keystrokes to carry out a repetitive task, copying a number from one system into another, logging into a portal, moving a file, according to a fixed set of rules.

37. 37 Process Automation

    Straight-Through Processing (STP)

    Straight-through processing (STP) is when a transaction moves from initiation to completion without manual intervention at any step in between.

38. 38 AI Trust, Analytics & Detection

    Vendor Management

    Vendor management is the ongoing work of maintaining supplier records, payment terms, and relationships, keeping vendor data accurate, resolving disputes, and making sure payments go out reliably and on the terms agreed.

39. 39 Process Automation

    Workflow

    A workflow is the sequence of steps a piece of finance work follows from start to finish: an invoice moving from receipt through coding, matching, approval, and payment, or a close task moving from open to reviewed to signed off.