The coronavirus pandemic has pushed companies and their work-from-home employee base to automate their bill-paying departments, a need filled by the new Semantik Invoice system from Irvine-based software developer Ephesoft Inc.
“Our customers are requesting more automated solutions and cloud-based solutions,” founder and Chief Executive Ike Kavas told the Business Journal on May 5.
“Even after the [pandemic] our business will thrive because more companies will call us to automate their businesses.”
Ephesoft says the cloud-based Semantik system can cut invoice processing time and associated costs by at least 30%. With more than half of invoices still processed manually and taking on average 8.5 days to process, accounts payable processing is ready for innovation, according to the company, whose software is used in finance and other industries to help automate document handling.
Profit Center
“Thankfully we’ve been developing this for the past year or so,” Kavas said. “Now with the automation of the accounts payable, we believe we can turn the accounts payable department into a profit center rather than a cost.”
Semantik is described as being extra secure, and boasts 97% accuracy, which is very high for the industry, the company said.
The system also contains artificial intelligence safeguards that kick out any non-conforming invoices for manual review, while the firm plans to add even more measures to ensure invoice validity, including fraud detection and alerts for duplicate invoices.
Customers can utilize the system, launched last month, within minutes, according to Kavas. “That’s the revolutionary part.”
Kavas said Semantik is a “plug-and-play” invoice processing system, and the price depends on the volume of the payments to be processed whether “it’s 10 invoices a day or 10 million.”
The system recognizes key fields including invoice date, terms, shipping date, tax rate, tax IDs, overall amount due and the purchase order number.
Ephesoft’s main competitors in the automation of accounts payable include Kofax, also in Irvine, and Abbyy in Milpitas.
Home Work, Marketing Issues
Kavas said his company is doing well during the COVID-19 crisis, from an operational standpoint.
“We’ve been very used to working from home even before the coronavirus,” Kavas said. Employees “that are in Irvine already work from home once or twice a week.”
“The coronavirus is bringing up working from home, scalability, automation to our customers’ minds.”
Kavas founded privately held Ephesoft in 2010 and the company had more than 160 employees as of late last year, with offices in Sydney, Singapore, London, Frankfurt, New Delhi, and Boise, Idaho, in addition to Irvine.
Some pandemic-related challenges remain.
Ephesoft’s Marketing Communications Manager Leah McEachern acknowledges “it’s an interesting time to launch a product with COVID-19.”
“We can’t really do any live events. We’re doing the best we can from a marketing point of view,” she added, saying the company has been relying on plans including webinars, customers contacts and website presentations.
Semantik Invoice is available now in North America, and will be rolled out internationally soon. Ephesoft has customers in more than 50 countries.
