Our February release was packed with exciting new features. Almost all of them have AI at their heart. When thinking about creating these features, we wanted to make sure that we weren't just using AI for the sake of it, and instead that we were connecting with our customers’ pains to create tools to really solve them.

We classify our AI features in one of two ways:

1. Enhancers 💪 - making your existing processes more reliable and faster; and 

2. Game-changers🏆 - delivering automation, scale and precision in ways that you haven’t seen before.

In this blog, we’ll dive into each of the new features, outlining their purpose, why they are an Enhancer or Game-changer, their capabilities and their impact.

Enhanced Invoice Processing

Purpose: To provide you with the best invoice processing experience and data extraction in the market. 
Enhancer or Game-changer: Enhancer. 💪

We've upgraded our invoice processor to use Large Language Model (LLM) technology, similar to what you find in ChatGPT. LLMs allow us to process invoices more intelligently, accurately, and securely.

What our new LLM can do:

⭐ Capability: Intelligently identifies account codes and categories at line item level based on descriptions.
🚀 Impact: Drives a more accurate view of business expenditure and reduces time spent coding invoices.

⭐ Capability: Accurately extracts bank details and lets you know if there is a mismatch with the bank details you already have for that supplier.
🚀 Impact: Saves the time it takes to manually enter bank details and identifies changes before payment is made.

⭐ Capability: Securely processes documents to to destroy any malicious content hidden inside them.
🚀 Impact: Eliminates the risk that malware is embedded in documents sent to you by third parties.

AI Assistant

Purpose: To provide you with quicker ways to access information and the ability to collaborate with the wider business or your external accountant, saving you time and reducing the noise in everyone’s email inbox.
Enhancer or Game-changer: Enhancer. 💪

Following a number of requests to allow team members to comment on invoices and purchase orders to discuss them internally, we’ve now created an internal chat where you can exchange information in real-time, making collaboration that much easier. 

We’re also building an AI Assistant which will help you navigate through Nook and access information faster. We understand that as companies add more features, using them, and navigating to the information you need, can be challenging. We see a future where having to navigate at all becomes a thing of the past, but for now, we’ll be keeping it as a handy assistant. Soon, you’ll be able to ask the AI Assistant what’s pending approval, your wallet balance, and more! 

What V1 of our Nook Chat can do:

⭐ Capability: You can chat with team members about invoices, purchase orders or credit notes.
🚀 Impact:  Now everyone in the team can know where an invoice, purchase order or credit note stands in its workflow at all times e.g. why something hasn’t been approved or paid yet.

Policies

Purpose: To make it easy to build powerful workflows that are tailored to your business and your suppliers. To provide you with quicker ways to access information and collaborate, saving you time.
Enhancer or Game-changer: Game-changer.🏆

From years of working with finance teams, we’ve observed that each business has its own unique rules to enforce in managing purchasing, suppliers and invoices, and payments.  Without an expensive ERP in place, these rules, or ‘policies’ are enforced by the finance team either through a manual approval process, or based solely on trust. 

We like to think of Policies as a magic wand that brings your unique rules into Nook and enforces them automatically; providing you with a totally personalised and controlled AP process that is quick and easy to implement and adapt yourself as business requirements change. 

Here are some examples of how Policies can be used today: 

Example 1: The customer in this example is an in-house general counsel working in a multi-entity company. She engages outside legal counsel regularly and needs to be able to keep track of legal fees for the different entities she is in charge of, as well as what project they belong to.

⭐ Capability: The customer creates a Policy that ensures their outside legal counsel correctly allocates partners to the right project at pre-agreed prices.
🚀 Impact: No longer do they need to check back to their contracts each time. The rules are now set in Nook and Nook will let her know if an invoice fails a policy.

Example 2: The customer in this example is the finance director at a pharmaceutical manufacturer. They make large orders that are fulfilled over a number of months and given the fluctuating costs in raw materials, want to maintain control over spend. They want to make sure that no invoice comes in for unit  prices higher than what they agreed in their purchase order. 

⭐ Capability: The customer creates a Policy that ensures that each of the many invoices allocated to a purchase order are for the pre-agreed price or each unit. Eventually the Policy will be able to close the purchase order when all the units have been allocated.
🚀 Impact: The customer doesn’t need to manually check when the order has been fulfilled. Nook will handle this for them. 

The options are limitless and we’re looking forward to seeing how companies use Policies in their AP workflows.