Industry: Real Estate, Employees: 3,500, Annual invoice volume: 3,500

AP cost- and time-savings driven by:

> 96% accuracy in invoice coding and classification

> Achieved a no-touch invoice processing rate of 72%

> Reduced processing time to 45 seconds per invoice
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Download the complete HSB the case study.
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HSB is a member-owned, cooperative organization that works with home savings, housing developments, and property management. Their mission is to create a safe, sustainable living environment where members can live, meet and enjoy themselves. As Sweden's largest housing cooperative, HSB has more than 620,000 members, 4,000 tenant-owner associations,35,000 elected representatives, and 31 regional HSB associations.

Driving innovation across the organization

HSB is a century-old organization, yet is known as one of Sweden’s most innovative companies.The housing cooperation’s invoice processing issue was negatively impacting the operation of their 6,000 properties. In order to remain a digital transformation leader, they knew incorporating advanced automation technologies, like artificial intelligence (AI), was a critical and natural evolution for managing their business workflows.HSB’s project team responsible for researching AI and automation solutions reached out toVic.ai to explore the platform. HSB vetted five different vendors, yet found Vic.ai was the only platform with AI-native capabilities. Built with proprietary AI trained on more than 1 billion invoices, Vic.ai brings specific use case technology to the table for AP teams. And, the Vic.ai team was able to demonstrate how the platform would go beyond automating the invoice process to proactively manage AP workflows autonomously, with zero human touch or review required. This meant the AI would grow smarter over time and take on time-consuming and repetitive tasks for most of the HSB accountants.

“We are on track to save more than 25,000 hours per year by automating manual invoice processing once Vic.ai is implemented in all our regions. This is an incredible amount of time that our staff can then reallocate to important areas in the business, such as corporate strategy, real estate needs, and capital investments. AI will change the lives of our employees and how our business works." - Fredrik Wiktor, Application Management Lead

The challenge: High invoice volume required too much manual work

With around 1.5 million invoices to process each year, HSB’sExecutive Finance team wanted to adopt autonomous accounts payable (AP) best practices for their financial operations to reduce employee time spent on manual accounting tasks. The business had existing software in place that scanned invoices, and then finance staff had to manually fill in any missing data. Invoices were then transferred into another software platform, which required employees to manually code and classify each invoice. The time it took to process an invoice through multiple systems and with no automation was incredibly laborious for the HSB team. And, with over 300 accountants in the finance department, any staff turnover meant new individuals had to be trained on several technologies and manual processes.

HSB needed a modern AP automation platform that could handle straight-through processing without relying on purchase orders (POs), while offering scalability to mitigate the organization's AP invoice challenges. HSB needed a vendor with deep invoice automation expertise and a purpose-built platform for AP processes.

The solution: With AI, HSB reaches a new height of automation

Once HSB implemented Vic.ai in June 2020, they could finally ditch the double coding required by their separate OCR and outdated AP software systems. Now — with one sophisticated platform — invoices are processed end-to-end. Once uploaded toVic.ai, invoices are ingested and coded by the platform’s proprietary AI intelligence on behalf of the accountants. This allows their accounting team to then quickly validate the data, instead of wasting time to manually enter into the system.

Over time, Vic.ai gets more confident in reading HSB’s invoice data, allowing no touch processing, which means the invoice is pushed straight from ingestion to approval, bypassing human review and validation. Vic.ai’s Autopilot feature is enabled when the system’s confidence requirement is met. For HSB, this level of accuracy was accomplished in the first full month on the platform, and now invoices are processed at 96% accuracy.

Also notable is the processing time per invoice.Previously, invoices took over 2 minutes toprocess — with Vic.ai, HSB now processesinvoices in just 45 seconds per invoice, savingthousands of staff hours.

Download the complete HSB the case study.