Transcript for ""Just Pay It" Is Costing You: How Urgent Invoices Create Financial Risk": Hi, everyone. I'm gonna go ahead and give folks a little bit to join here, but I see some people trickling in. Hope everybody's having a good day so far. We're glad you could join us. And at this point, I think we're gonna go ahead and get started. Alright. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for our webinar. My name is Taylor Dekorte. I'm on the North American events team here at Emburse and your host for today's webinar. Our webinar today is titled just pay it is costing you, how urgent invoices create financial risk. And before we go ahead and get started here, I just wanna go through a couple housekeeping items. This session is being recorded. A copy of the recording will be emailed to you twenty four hours after the event ends. To the right, you'll find the engagement section with several tabs full of goodies. Under the docs tab, we've curated some additional resources relevant to today's material. You'll also find a Q and A tab here as well. Please feel free to submit any and all questions under that Q and A tab. We encourage you to submit these throughout the webinar and we'll do our best to address them before our session ends. Chat is also available today, so feel free to engage with us and your fellow webinar attendees. And lastly, we have a special offer for our customers who have joined today. Included in the docs tab is a link to register for our annual in person motion conference. This link does give you an extra 10% off, so be sure to take advantage of that offer. You'll wanna be, you'll wanna register and apply that discount by the end of this week so that it stacks on top of that early bird pricing. However, this offer is good up until the first 100 registrants. So get registered quickly before the it's gone. In addition to the EIM registration, you'll also find, some additional curated resources specific to this webinar, as well as links to our upcoming webinars for March. We've just announced two new webinars for March, so go ahead and take a look at those as well. We have lots of exciting things coming up. And that will do it for our housekeeping items. So I'm gonna go ahead and next, I'll be introducing our speakers for today. At this time, I'm gonna have Mike and Landon join me on stage. I'd like to introduce our lovely speakers. Landon, if you wanna join us. as well. This. me. He's just taking a second. Perfect. So Mike McKay, I'm sure some of you are familiar. Mike's joined us for some webinars in the past. Mike is a lead solutions consultant here at Emburse who specializes in identifying what solutions best fit your needs. And Landon Gordon, I think, Landon, you've also done a webinar or two in the past as well, but, we're excited to have you here. Landon is our VP of product management who works to help ensure invert Emburse is developing forward thinking solutions that address the ever changing finance landscape. And with that, I'll go ahead and hand it over to Landon. Oh, actually, we're gonna, Hi, everybody. How are you doing? Landon Gordon, VP of Product at, Emburse. I have been here for a year, focuses on the accounts payable services and the payment services that we provide today. If you want to go to the next slide or Mike, do you want to introduce. yourself? I'll I'll quickly introduce myself and then just kinda take over here from here. So, yes, I've done a couple of webinars. My real focus here at in Inverse, I really have a very unique role in the fact that I get to work with sales folks supporting our sales teams. I get to work with clients and and net new prospects, but I also have a direct line into product. So Landon and I actually work quite a bit together. This is our first webinar together, but we work quite a bit together in in, you know, looking at our products, where should we be going next, how can we improve those particular things. You know, today, we're gonna talk a little bit about this concept of just pay it. You know, in in when I first thought about this and the the team that supports Landon and I who helped put together the slide deck, it was kinda funny. I was like, well, this is really gonna be a really short webinar. Don't do that. That's bad. And then we'll give everybody back a lot of a lot of time back in their day. But, you know, when I thought of it, first of don't you know, just pay it just pay it fast or just pay it, it was the concept of I've looked through hundreds, if not thousands, of vendor masters, and I've looked at, you know, the the the back end, and I've looked at the, you know, the check request and all the all the things that happen in an AP. And one thing that always just always jumped out to me was pay upon receipt. Right? Pay when the invoice come comes in. And so that's what I was thinking about when they first brought this concept to me. And as I went through it, I I I looked a little bit deeper and thought about it a little bit more. You know, really, this goes through the entire process of invoice management all the way through payment. And the fact of, you know, there's a there's a lot of times that we're just trying to rush through our roles. We're ingesting an invoice. I wanna get that invoice into the into the tool as quickly as I can. I wanna get it coded quickly. So we're gonna do some shortcuts here, and we're gonna code it. Or approvals. You know, Bob's on vacation. Send it to Sally. Right? But Bob is really the one that should be approving it. So there's there's a lot of rush that happens all the way through the process. It's not just the payment. It's really the entire process. And that's what kinda we're gonna talk about today. We're gonna talk a little bit about where AI makes a lot of sense, and we should be partnering with AI. And then we're probably gonna talk a little bit about where AI is a little bit more concerning, and we should maybe not use AI in that particular tool, in that particular area. But, again, I think my goal here is that is that when we talk about just just pay it, it's more than just the payment. It's the entire workflow, if you will. Right? Because risk really lives in the entire process. So let's talk a little bit about this, and and it was kinda funny. When I was putting together the talk track for this particular slide, Landon and I had just got off a call together, and we were talking about our day that we were just in a meeting each. His meeting was different than mine. But by the time we got off the meeting, we were added to three or four additional Slack channels. We had a a dozen independent DMs, direct messaging or whatever you wanna call it. Right? Slacks. And then we had our email boxes. And I think sometimes is is people working in the office, you feel like, well, I I wanna clean this slate up. I'm gonna go answer all these these direct messages. I'm gonna go answer. I'm go review the Slack channels, and then I'm go over to email. I'm gonna answer my emails. And I think sometimes that that falls into the role of AP. I wanna get all of my exceptions done. I wanna get all my invoices cleared out of my queue. So tomorrow morning, I can start my day brand new at zero. And a lot of times, what we see is we're we're encouraging a lot of noise from sometimes it's our vendors. Right? As we talked about here, sometimes it's simply our vendors that are reaching out to us and saying, hey. We need to we sent you an invoice. We need to get paid. Or it could be a buyer. It could be an internal conversation of, hey. This particular vendor treats us really well. They, provide great products. They ship on time. We need to get them paid. So sometimes that that messaging isn't only coming from the outside of our organization. It's coming from within. Right? Sometimes it's the tools that we use. There's particular gaps in the tools that we use so that we feel like, you know what? This invoice isn't right in front of me, so I'm gonna take it from soup to nuts. I'm gonna get it entered. I'm gonna get it coded, and I'm gonna get it approved, and I'm gonna get it paid. Because if I just code it, then I lose all the visibility to it, and I don't know when to pay it. So sometimes it's the technology that we use. You know, the other side of that is is sometimes it's it's, you know, what's in the next step. Right? What's what's the things that we need to get done next? Right? So I'm having a hard time reading my size. How do I blow this up just a little bit? Taylor, I apologize. But I've got a very small view here. Well, while you're doing that, I just to add to. what you're is, you know, I think from a product perspective, we see, as we do research on folks and and benchmarking AP teams, you see, like, the sub 50% touchless rate will correlate with an urgency spike. Spike. Right? If we've got a lot of stuff in the inbox, it takes a lot of manual effort. That tooling gap sometimes creates that that urgency as well to the vendors. And I do think, like, you know, that generates that pressure to clear the queue reflex. that you're trying to talk about. Right, Mike? And, and sometimes that urgency is really around the tooling gaps, the policy failure. So maybe it's not that the vendor is missing. You know, it doesn't know. He's just not sure, And it's really around our tooling gaps of not, helping support your AP team to to satisfy those those things as they come up. No. I don't know. Perfect. Let's just. end up here. That's you're exactly right. And and Taylor just let me know that, unfortunately, for somebody my age that should be wearing glasses, I'm just kind of doomed here. But, yeah, the the last one is is is sometimes it's just what I talked about at the beginning of this slide is this is just your process. I I just this is what I do every day. I get the invoice in. I code it. And so it just becomes repetitive and that you think that sometimes that urgency is really not urgency anymore. It's just become your day to day process. And so, you know, it just becomes a habit. It comes a routine. And that's not always the way, you know, that AP, especially AP, should operate. Landon, anything else you wanna add on to that before I kinda move on? Nope. Nope. I had my parts in while you were yeah. So we're good. So we're gonna move to our first poll question and just kinda queue it up here. Where does urgency most often come from within your AP process? Now I've got a guess. I don't know if Landon's got a guess what's gonna queue up first, but we're gonna we're gonna give a a moment to fill this poll out, and let's see what what the real people of AP tell us. And I'm gonna come join you for a second because I realized I forgot to clarify one thing in the beginning. We do have several poll questions scattered throughout this webinar. So as we open those, you will see a poll tab pop up in that engagement center next to the chat. So feel free to use that to submit your poll responses. And I'll share that for our speakers here so we can see those responses as they're coming in. Mike, Landon, it looks like internal stakeholders has taken quite the lead with our. responses here. I guessed wrong. That's awful. I'm supposed to be the expert. I guessed wrong. That's my guess. I I figured I mean, I you know, everybody everybody always wants to know what's happening ASAP. Well, that's? true. Right? Especially in large buying organizations. And I knew we we hear that a lot. Right? The buyers are. buyers are the ones that are applying the pressure on behalf of the supplier. Well, Awesome. Thanks for thanks. guys, I think we're good to move on. So I'm gonna close that out for us and get back to our slide deck. Perfect. Thank you. So, you know, this this is another interesting area, right, in the fact of fast approvals don't mean disciplined spend. You know, I think, you know, as as we kinda look at this, operational drag in my mind affects everyone and everyone's job. Right? Especially within AP, there's a lot of operational drag that we experience all the way from invoice ingestion to coding to approvals. Right? There's always little hiccups along the way, if you will. But, you know, what what happens is is that we we don't get a chance to go back and look at a lot of the root causes of what's going on. Right? We're so focused on a couple of these areas like exception cleanup. Right? We work the exceptions to get them cleaned up so tomorrow's a new day, and I can get through those exceptions next to tomorrow. And we don't think about what is causing the exception. What what's the root cause of that exception? You know, I think, you know, when we talk about reconciliation, I think of reconciliation, a lot of times around the credit card, but it happens in AP spend as well. I mean, just in credit cards, I've known many organizations that spend so much time on reconciliation that the value of paying somebody with a virtual card or with a credit card just becomes so so problematic that they get rid of the program and the benefits that that program provides to them. So, again and they're not going back and looking at what is causing this record reconciliation issue. And the last one there is really, you know, the longer close cycles. I always kinda go back always is that the problem is many times exceptions become the rule. They become so much part of our process that we go through and we do them over and over and over that it really just becomes the rule of of how we do it. And that's exactly what we're talking about in the next area of of risk and compliance, this this policy drift. Right? It's kinda something that I've talked about in a little bit candor at the beginning of of, well, Bob's not here. Have Sally approve the invoice or vice versa. Right? And Bob's never in his office, so we're gonna have Sally do it. Bob's got all the visibility to it. He knows exactly what this is for, but we've allowed the the the exception become the rule, and that really, really impacts us, all the way through the rest of the life cycle of a particular invoice. As we go through this. You know, we'll talk a little bit about tax compliance, but we have duplicate payments. You know, we get so much in a rush that we're we're processing a duplicate invoice or and we or we approve a duplicate payment. And sometimes by the time we find out for these that these things have happened, it's it's too late. We can't go back and repair it. You know, as. we look about cash and we look about the blind spots Landon, were you gonna say something? Oh, I I was just gonna add that, yeah, we we consistently will see, areas where duplicate payment rates spike. Right? They're in environments where prioritizing that speed over a structured validation effort where you're worried about getting it out. You you skip past things instead of, like, validating, are we sure that this isn't a duplicate? And the tools helping with that often, you know, once you have it out, it's it's much harder to go and recollect it after you've paid out a duplicate payment, Yeah. for example, or a duplicate invoice. Yeah. No. It's a great it's a great it's it's a a great piece right there, you know, and the fact of if if you're very manual based still in your invoice process, right, somebody fat fee fat keys a $5,000 payment now becomes 50. You rush to get that invoice through through approval, and you rush it through it and get it approved. You've just sent out $50,000 instead of $5,000. Right? These things happen all the time or, like you said, even in a duplicate environment. And the problem. is is that by the time sometimes you catch these things, it's just too late to go back to try to retrieve that duplicate payment or whatever it might be. Right. The, you know, the other thing is is around, you know, cash and the blind spots that come up. You know, the first thing I always think about is your com you know, as a buyer, you're compressing your DPO. You're giving up potential discount, and we're gonna talk about that a little bit more. But just as a as a bare rule of thumb, I always kinda talk about an effect of in in in discounts and and, things like that, 10% of your supplier base will typically offer you a 2% discount if you can pay them early. Right? Two net 10 is very common, and it's usually around two per it's usually around 10% of your supplier base. Now that's not all the time. Depends on the vertical you're in. But that's what we're talking about here is, right, if you're compressing your DPO all the time, why would your vendor supplier agree to a discount? You're already paying them early. They you've given up all of your your leverage there. Right? Yeah. I mean and, yeah, your your forecast erosion, right, begins with your when your obligations are unclear during your payment posting. But I think, like, were mentioning, like, your value for that discount leakage. The discount leakage comes with your speed, but also it hides in that approval leg, not necessarily the payment delay. And so that work, you're talking about that horizon of of quickly getting stuff in accepted, understand your duplications, your data validation, and then helping you make that decision so you can drive a value towards either a discount or holding onto the money for your cash is you know, that's the spot where you you see the the biggest value for what you're doing. Nope. Agreed. And and I you know, I'm, I guess, maybe a little bit old school. I'm still kind of the cash is king. Right? So we talk about that. And the fact of, you know, if if you're paying rush payment, you're look you're you're giving up your liquidity. Right? And if you don't have a good understanding of what's coming down the line, you could put again, putting yourself or your organization at risk that we've gotta go we've gotta go to a lender to cover payables because we paid too early on some of these other other areas. I I'm, you know, I'm sure there's a lot of CFOs and treasurers out there just like me that still have the ability to say, you know, cash is king. Let's let's pay on terms. Right? Speed versus control. Right? So we just kinda touched on all of these. And, Landon, you had some great, points as well. Right? But in my mind, when you are so rushed to to clear your docket, if you will, or clear your workflow or clear your queue, right, you are giving up leverage. Right? We talked about this. There's always a struggle between the buyer and the supplier in DPO versus DSO. But, again, if you are paying early all the time, you've given up that leverage. You've given up that ability to reach out to your vendor and supplier and have a more strategic conversation because you have nothing to give. You're already paying quickly, almost due upon receipt, type of mentality. And, again, as Landon talked about, it's it's all the way through the process of of, you know, getting the invoice coded, getting it approved, and getting it paid, and then actually making the pay making the payment. And as we'll touch on just briefly, are you paying the right way? Are you paying using the right modality of the payment rail? So giving up, speed versus control always impacts your leverage with your vendors, suppliers. We've talked about how it can impact, your your ability to to get a discount. Right? And then reducing your look liquidity. We we touched on that. And I can't really again, we came out of an area era five years ago where, you know, we were getting $0 on the cash that you were investing in short or long term paper. We've moved out of that era. We're in a little bit higher interest rate environment. So putting cash into short and long term paper does have a benefit. Interest rates are starting to slide back down. But I again, I still believe that organizations need to hold their cash unless there's reasons, such as an early payment discount or whatever it might be, but making sure that your forecasting is done correctly. And then, again, I I talk about this a lot in a lot in a lot of different areas is that just practice becomes almost the the rule of the land. It becomes a habit. Right? If this is. your process every day, this is really gonna become a habit, and you're not gonna think about what risk you're infusing into your process. Yeah. And just to follow-up with the poll, you. know, as you say, like, speed and control, The control lives in the visibility, not the velocity. Right? The velocity drives, downstream decisions related to that liquidity, that discount value, other things. But without without the visibility, it's hard to control, what are your next steps that you can do or or help the internal stakeholders understand why. Right? And so it's an important part of, like, how we, certainly, we obviously work on products that help to enhance that visibility, but it's, the focus is really about how do you how do you empower you for using that visibility to help you with those stakeholders. Great point. Oh, this is me. It is you. Alright. So, you know, approving an invoice answers one question. Is this obligation legitimate? Right? Releasing payment answers a different question about is this the right time and method to move cash? They're not the same decision. Right? So, and yet many organizations are treated as one continuous motion. Approved means paid. Paid means done. That's where speed quietly compresses that leverage that we've been talking about. So what are we seeing in 2026 with, leading finance teams? They're separating obligation clarity, cash timing, payment method strategy. Why? Because DPO, liquidity rebates, covenant compliance live in that second decision. The the the goal of trying to understand the once you've understood, yeah, we agreed to this obligation, now when do we wanna act on this? Right? So autonomous invoice capture, excellent. We're using that, you know, small plug. Our AI is getting people into that autonomous invoice capture up in the above 90% now. Right? Great use of AI. Autonomous triage, smart. Right? Like, this is where we help with, helping you see the signals of, should I question this? Should I give somebody else an approval process? A pay autonomous payment release, that's a different risk, entirely. Right? Like, that's an area where, I'm an avid fan of AI. I love it. We utilize it extensively here. But do we think that we want to have, clients have, you know, want us to start moving money autonomously? We don't think so. We think that's where that's your risk class. We wanna help you make it easy. We wanna help you make it simple, but we wanna make sure that humans are kept accountable for moving the money. That's our that is our goal for what we're trying to drive. And I think that's where everybody's you know, where you're trying to divide this this difference between these two in AP and why why it's important for humans to stay in control and AI as a copilot in that mindset. Mike, do you have any thoughts there? No. You know, I've heard you speak about that before, Landon, and I and I really had to think about it a little bit when you first brought it up where and I I, you know, I broke it down. I'm a salesperson, so I'm gonna I had to break it down a little simpler. Right? And the fact of there's areas where you wanna partner with with AI. Right? Because there's. a lot of things, like you said, that that that are low risk and AI is perfect for. But, again, there are those areas, especially within AP and other parts of your organization, where the risk just outweigh outweighs the benefit of AI. And can you use AI to help you a little bit? Yes. But you don't wanna. give autonomous control. So, yeah, I I I can't agree with you more. Yeah. So we we feel like, if the same policy governs the invoice coding, the payment release, and vendor bank changes, risk is hiding in that simplicity. And if you can't articulate who owns those three control points, you know, that approval process, the release, the vendor changes, the payment out, then urgency is running the process, and that's where we feel like, you know, it sounds like a great idea, but we really think that you have to map those three roles in your org. And if they collapse into one workflow, you'd probably optimize for speed and not control. Yep. You can go to the next slide. Oh, So yeah. So, you know, speaking to that, poll question here, like, are we seeing in the same way as you? Do you govern invoice approvals and payment releases separate risk decisions today? Yes, no, or not consistently. You know, how does that internal stakeholder group sort of change that dynamic for you? I love it. Oh. I can't recall, Megan. How or, how long do we keep do that, Taylor? Okay. Thank you. I don't see the poll results. So did it did it ended up being mostly it looked like did I see mostly everybody? Yes. They separated, which is great. I love to hear that. Feels good. Alright. So, so now we're mostly in a moment where AI can move very fast. It's it's astounding. We had a conversation today, even just internally about even how much, our own development teams are now enabling AI to help them with writing code, for example. And it's that powerful. Like, it has moved. Even in the last three to six months. It has changed significantly what's possible out there. But in finance, speed without explanation is a risk. And I think that's where we see, you know, right, utilizing AI in this in a, you know, copilot function is such an important thing because CFOs don't answer to the dashboards. They answer to boards and auditors and regulators. So here's the line that we feel that we draw in helping you or what we think you should draw as well is autonomous invoice capture and anomaly detection, great use of AI. Autonomous disbursement, that's a government's that's a governance exposure. So the real shift in 2026 is that we're moving from workflow automation to decision intelligence. Right? That means AI helps you with surface duplicate risks, detect anomaly patterns, flag tax discrepancies. Like, when you think now in a in a global environment, you have various tax discrepancies that you need to handle. Forecast that cash impact suggest optimal timing. But we're that's a suggestion, not a do this now. Right? But it also must also explain the why. Like, in all those things that we just talked about, if if we don't help if the AI is not helping you explain why, then why an invoice was coded a certain way, why a tax rule was applied, why timing payment payment timing was recommended, then finance hasn't really gained any intelligence. It has outsourced that judgment. And I don't think anybody wants to outsource their judgment right now to AI, especially when it comes to payment activities. So explainable AI is not a feature. It's a governance requirement. Right? You know, it's a great example. My my children have a love hate for ChatGPT, and they often will question, you know, is that is that really your answer, or did ChatGPT share that idea to you? Yeah. And so especially around dad jokes. They often think that I over I overuse ChatGPT for dad jokes. So so you gotta tie the metrics. This is where the metrics shift. Right? Touchless rate isn't the goal. Cost per invoice, it could be a goal, but it's not the main goal of what you're trying to do. The real outcomes around lower exception rates, fewer duplicate payments, higher discount capture, more predictable DPO. Like, that's an intelligence before you execute. Because if you have that, then, you know, it cost to justify of a touchless rate is less important than I know why we know we're not doing duplicate events payments. We're not getting into exception management. We're into understanding stuff before they go out the door. So if your AI can't defend its recommendations in front of your audit committee, for example, it really shouldn't be moving your cash. Oh, yeah. This one. Yeah. So, what changes here when we talk about when obligations are clear before payment, what changes when obligations are clear before payment? These three things are kind of the important part of that. Right? Like, exceptions drop, forecast accuracy improves, close accelerates without compression risk. Like, that's that's kind of the three things that we we would wanna really touch on because, like, that's where that clarifying activity comes into play. Right? How do you make sure that you, are compressing that risk and feeling confident? Most of the things you know, we're talking most things you probably already have this naturally in your heads. Like, you know which vendors are just, like, tried and true. There's nothing of risk there. It's you know, as AP has expanded and you guys have much more, vendors out there, it's it's turned wild in our own world as far as how many different AI services that we might be utilizing. And so there's a lot of variants coming with new vendors in play than maybe legacy vendors that you've had, but that's when that compression when that risk, drives that. So in 2026, for example, 70 to 90% touchless processing is becoming a standard in mature environments. But the nuance is that that invoice intelligence needs to, like, clarify obligation early and filter your risk upstream and provide that context before approval, or you have to guide that decision before release. Like, that's that's the main thing. Right? Like, how much how much do you decide between after you've accepted an invoice, say, yep. Everything looks good on here. We've got it in there. Now you're deciding, do I approve this and when do I release it as to set next to horizons on the process. So, it's how AP really shifts from, throughput center to liquidity lever. Right? Like, I think you all naturally do this, but it's it never fails to point that now as 2026 is accelerating these things, that liquidity lever is now becoming even more prevalent in what's gonna happen for your your environment. Like, those internal stakeholders are starting to think of these type of type of decisions, for what you're trying to accomplish. Sorry, Mike. It looks like you have something to say, No. and I might have run over. No. Okay. So, yeah. So, you know oh, given the tax risk. Yeah. Sorry. I'm jumping on over. So in so this is an important area that we've spent some time on as well, but it's it's important for folks to understand, especially whether you're just US based or you're international. International folks that have been doing global, you understand that now over 80% of the countries are implementing or planning structured e invoicing mandates. And so this isn't a regional project anymore. It's it's an always on compliance environment. But it's tax errors are really traumatic, but they're late, and that causes problems. But what happens now with e invoicing mandates is they've moved if you're not engaged in it the right way, you also comes with fines. So before we might have seen, oh, there was a tax error. There's some work you have to do on the back end as an exception that can be costly with the audit and clawbacks. That front side is no longer, just free anymore. It's not a zero risk anymore because if you now have a vendor in Belgium and you're a US, you need to comply to the e tax invoice, the e invoicing mandates that are there as far as how you receive payment transactions or invoice transactions from them. And so that's really that's turned that validation instead of being after posting or during your audit, it's now turned into a front end, ingestion part of your process that you have to set. Or if you're on the AR side, what you have to send out, you have to make sure that you're going through these new tax e tax invoice entities like PEOPLE or, Poland. I can never remember as well. SIPR, I think, is the name of it. So there's a variety of these services that are out there, or, tax, EDI structures that you have to support. But then you're you're now by then, you're really not, where we've all, like, acted before this was really we dealt with it in history, and now it's up front. So that validation needs to happen at intake before the approval habits form. And that's why we moved tax validation upstream. It's not it's just where it needs to be now is that you have to think about, do I need to worry about etax validation? Do I need to send something in there? That's where you have to accept those vendor transactions in these countries, but it's growing. If we're at 80%, it's a fast rapidly cycling. We have Poland coming up next. You know, there's Germany. They did some delays, but it's it's it is forming its foothold in the AP process, and you now have to think about early validation, as being the cheaper way of handling it than later correction. Yeah. We we we talked about a little bit earlier in the presentation, right, Landon, that that, you know, these these things might not be prevalent right in your face. But when you go through your audit process, you're gonna find out very, very quickly. And like you said, you know, the EU and all, the the different countries have been threatening for this for years and years and years, and it's it's been delayed and been delayed. Well, the delays are starting to get shorter and shorter. Like you said, Belgium is on the line. Poland's coming. France is coming. Germany is coming in there. And and I think that the time for delays is over. It's action. Yes. Right? Now it's action. It certainly is. And I mean, I think, you know, I see some of you are international. I'm sure that you've already been worrying about this. But we certainly know that that's an area that you should pay attention to. You know? This if this webinar's teaching you anything, you you should quickly become aware if you have vendors that are in Belgium, in Germany, Italy, Poland, and be quickly thinking about the strategy to that. You can certainly talk to us. We have a strategy with that with our product, but want you to be more aware of what do you have to worry about for 2026, and that's an important one. Yep. You know, so so, Landon Gordon, you know, just just to kinda get back to the slide that's up on the screen. Right? We we when I look at this, right, I I really kinda go back to early in my career, when I started an AP quite a long time ago and and payment processing quite a long time ago. There was always this big push, and if folks have heard me talk about this before, I apologize, but there was a huge push probably twenty plus years ago. It was all about efficiency. It that's the only name in the game in the town was efficiency. An unautomated invoice was $20. An automated invoice was $5. The delta in between went right to your bottom line. We need to squeeze every dollar and every nickel out of an invoice. What we saw then, you know, come after that after that first push for automation was this concept of, you know, now we need to shorten the cycle time. No matter that we've automated the invoice, it's still taking too long to get this automated invoice through all the different partners and get it paid. So it's all 100% about squeezing the life cycle of that invoice. And then probably around ten years ago, we saw this push for, nope. It's all about data. All those things are important. Efficiency is important. Squeezing the cycle time was important, but it was now about data. And what we've seen most recently is it's about actionable data. It's about the the dashboard. What can you in what can you conclude data that you're looking at? It's not about having reams and reams of data or spreadsheets and spreadsheets. It's what can I see and that is actionable? And what I really think has happened, and maybe, you know, maybe you agree, maybe you disagree, but I think what's happened in the last twelve months or eighteen months, maybe a little bit longer, is that AI is really it it's almost like a renaissance period because AI is really starting to go back and looking at the beginning of this thing is, okay. We became more efficient when we automated, but now let's squeeze every penny out of it. Right? Let's make everything. super highly efficient. And, also, how can we squeeze down the cycle times without shortcutting processes to make sure that we're getting the visibility necessary to make the right approval steps? So I think AI has fundamentally and will continue to fundamentally change the landscape of just purely technology for for software and for payment processing. So that's what I that's kinda what I'm thinking about is what is next and and what are some of the other areas that AI can help us. Yeah. I I can't disagree with you. My I I think the biggest thing we see with the clients, even the ones that we're talking about here, and what we mentioned before about that visibility before velocity, they they understood what was important for them to do, their various business. I mean, these are three different kind of organizations, legal, you know, construction, and whatnot. But what they did do, instead of overly complicated rigid rules, they they really focused on how do they have visibility into doing the right approvals or the right data that helps them matter. If it's a client matter number, it's a project, you know, they might have unique identifiable fields that they think is important for their business, and that's that drives that that decision tree, faster than just trying to over design a workflow. And that's, you know, to just focus on the speed of who gets to approvals the fastest or something like that. And I think it's a it's where AI is really flipping the script away from you know, what we would do in the in the legacy world is always talk about your vendor master data and how do you keep it clean and how do you keep it pure. And we really you know, if you think about it where AI is changing things in 2026 and 2027 is it's almost going to a non like, it's a rule engine doesn't matter as much as, data value matters to your organization and and how to adapt to that. And that's the thing that, you know, you you know, as you think about this, that it seems a little bit counterproductive because you're like, hey. We designed these rules and whatnot. But all those little nuances and exceptions that you struggle with that cause these, like, you know, outside gaps that force that all of a sudden urgency, Those things change when you think about a a more horizon focus on the data is, like, if this data comes, do we worry about Bob, or is Karen really the best for for policy vacation, or is it better just to hold off? Because we have no discount risk. We have no, you know, anything else. Our DPO doesn't really matter if Bob's on vacation. That's a good example. Yep. Right? Like, that's not the way you design rules today in a rules engine, but that's where AI is taking it. Nope. Agreed. So, you know, I I think sometimes we we you know, you you think of us or or you think about, you know, we're going to a webinar. We're gonna learn about things because they're gonna try to you know, they're gonna try to push new software on us. That's really not what our conversation was about today. It was really more about you don't need a new system, but, you know, it's more about you really need to take a a deep look, into your processes. Right? You know, is it is it that we're highly automated that we automated ten years ago and our software is is out of scope or it just doesn't fit our needs anymore? Or when we deployed it, we had a particular process within our business, and that process has changed. And we haven't updated the row the rules within our organization to to make it work. So, you know, is the software up to date, or is the is the, the rules engine are you using it to the best of your ability? Right? I think those are the kind of the things. Right? The nest you know, where where have exceptions quietly become the policy or become the rule? Again, I talk about that quite a bit in in conversations is is where is where you've done it so many times like this. Well, you know, we did it like this last month. Didn't hurt us. You know, we we we did the same thing last week. It didn't hurt us. Why why don't we just do the same thing tomorrow? Right? And so you need to kinda take a a look back to understand what your primary goals are. Right? What are you trying to achieve And making sure that the tools that you're using and the processes that you're using and the rules engines that you're using are meeting those goals, you're not finding, lack of a better term, shortcuts to get around it. Right? And then, obviously, you think about not only, I think, the timing, right, of the payment, the visibility to the obligation, right, as as Landon talks about, we we've obligated. We've received the invoice. Now we need to time the payment, because we've already timed how the invoice is gonna flow through the technology. We're gonna make sure we have the right visibility, the right eyes on the invoice. We're gonna go follow the rules. Now you need to start thinking a little bit about the rail. Right? How are we gonna pay that vendor supplier? Are we gonna leave them on a paper check? Are we gonna use the low value clearing system within the country, such as ACH here in The United States? Or are we gonna use a virtual card? So timing and rail become equally important. I guess we're onto the la I think this is the last poll question we have. Yep. Last last Which areas creates the most risk in your process today? Again, I wish, Landon, you and I should have bet on a couple of these. I would have lost so far, but I I think we should have we should have put some wagers down. So I I'll let, Taylor come back in and and, kind of, bring these up so we can watch these in real time and and go from here. Just give everybody a few minutes to to fill that out. Wow. It's making making sense. This one makes sense to me. I I would've won this one. You would have won. I I would have picked approvals and and oh oh, visibility and reporting's creeping up there. Yeah. Oh, it's past the second. I like it. Perfect. Well, I think we're we're getting close to being out of the time here. So we could finish this up, and then we can move on to the to the next one to the next kind of finish up. Perfect. Great feedback, though. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. And Thank you so much for filling those out because I I think, you know, maybe we'll go back and we'll look at some of these and really maybe have another discussion or a webinar around some of the the, poll questions. Well, I mean, it helps because that's what we focused on in 2025 was all about intake and validation. Yeah. So. It's very you know, you're you're absolutely right, and it still comes up as one of the one of the top risk areas. And you're absolutely right. That's where we have really focused is really that ingestion of the invoice, yeah. Yeah. which is fantastic. Landon, I'll let you finish up with with this particular slide. Absolutely. This was for fun. We as we were thinking about webinar and talking through, like, AI, we thought, hey, we we could give you a prompt so you could actually do investigation on your own team, you know, when you have the time. So this is our Monday morning AI prompt. Stick it into your favorite AI tool, but it's imagine it's 2026 and AI is the standard part of modern AP operations and write a short AI and AP policy for your team that answers these two questions. The reason we picked these was, it helps you you know, if you haven't tried it, we tried a few of these just to make sure that we picked it. But it really it allows you to kind of, like, open up the AI tool, have some fun talking with you know, going through the debate over what do you think are the AP tasks that are comfortable fully automating in AI. It brings up great counterpoints for you to consider as far as, like, what challenges do you have about your data capture, your invoice coding, and things like that. So it's a fun exercise if you've got the time to and it keeps it really practical. That last part is really important. Keep this practical and realistic. We don't wanna mirror you know, we don't want it to be an echo chamber. It's really trying to help you think through the things that we think about as we're trying to figure out, how how AI is really changing the landscape, in the marketplace. You know, we agentic and like, we talked about this this almost decoupling of the rules engine world that's starting to happen, even in our own environment that we're working on for our clients. But, it's it's it helps you reframe, think through maybe some stuff that you dust off that you haven't considered before, in exploring in your own organization. So just a fun fun Monday prom. So I think this was me. Right? Yep. Yeah. So 2026, AP leaders will be measured on more of throughput. I think that's we already know that. You already saw that you helped us with your poll saying that. So just kinda rein in instituting. I think what you'll see is your as you will hear from your stakeholders or even from your board is about they're gonna start asking questions about DPO discipline. Have you guys thought about discount capture? You know, these things are gonna resurface again because they expect that intake is gonna be simplified, very quickly. You know, they've probably heard all the stories about all the changes in how AI can can change the way intake data comes in. And so they're gonna really be focusing on asking questions about exception reduction, fraud prevention, forecast accuracy. I'm just gonna use an internal one from, Inverse. We have a tool. We have an AI bot that helps with, change passwords, for folks. Like, they get locked out, and so it helps them go through the process. You know, doing the two method authentication eliminates the social hacking that can occur. But it wasn't at a 100%. So our board was like, well, why is it not at a 100%? And so, you know, these are the kind of questions now that boards are asking about, you know, how are you guys utilizing AI? Right? And so these things, I think you you'll have to dust off and think about how you're gonna approach those in this new world. Fraud is increasingly AI driven. It's it's scary to say, but, you know, there's you probably saw some of the notices about, noise on duplicate receipts and people generating receipts for, their Lamborghini rental or something like that that they didn't actually rent. So it's a, you know, manual it's an important thing for you to think through, like, what's how you helping validate stuff, having a little bit more insight on that to ensure that you're not getting caught up in an AI driven fraud. Manual import manual email approvals are not controlled. They're really an exposure. So think through how you consider, you know, ensuring that that email process that you might have existing today is is getting augmented. So, you know, there's simply there there's so many that we could talk about. But the the key is that this invoice intelligence, that payments that how would I say this? Some that kinda struggle a little bit, but it's like, decide what AP is accountable for in 2026. Is it just throughput, or is it that insight leverage and predictability? And I would say it's probably driving more into the insight leverage predictability, but it's, you know, it's something that you will now be faced with as AI news and data comes out more and more related to accounts payable. No. I Landon, I think you're I think you're spot on. Right? I I think we're I think you're star we see it a lot in my mind of AP teams being much more strategic than simply getting invoices through the you know, quickly get it through and get it out. Right? They're they're they're being used for much more strategic purposes, and AI is definitely gonna help that in some ways. You know, automation helps with that in some ways as well. Right? So I I think more and more, there's gonna be more responsibility in less busy work for APs. I I don't know if I'm saying that correctly, but I think I think there's gonna be more strategic use of AP than just simply getting throughput through the from ingestion throughout the payment. Right. Right. And I I accidentally started talking including '19, so I apologize, Taylor. I didn't tell you to flip over. So I I got I was this was the part I was talking about, and I meant to tell you to switch, and I I forgot. But, yeah, same same point that we just said. So, unless you wanna add any more to this Mike. No. All good. All good. Alright. I think we're open for questions. I'm not sure. I haven't been watching the chat. I'm not sure if we have a lot of questions or I haven't seen any so far. Oh, Might get off easy today. alright. Give it another minute in case people are typing. I was on mute the whole time. Sorry, guys. Did did you have a great conversation with. yourself? I did. Yep. I was just saying we do either got a really shy audience or you guys were so thorough in your presentation that we haven't gotten any questions yet. But we do have a couple more minutes here, so we'll stay on here just to see if any come trickling in. And in the meantime, I do want to remind folks that for our customers in attendance, we do have a discount code if you haven't registered for EIM yet. Definitely take advantage of that. It's an extra 10% off valid for the first 100 people to use that code. And if you stack it on top of early bird this week and get registered by the end of the week here, it's extra discounted for you. So get registered quickly, and take advantage of that. I also wanna call out, our webinar subscription program. We have two webinars coming up in March here. And if you are a part of that webinar subscription program, you'll get automatically enrolled in all of our thought leadership webinars. So for those who have already registered and signed up for that, you should have also received an invitation, to join us for our modern CFO playbook webinar. That one's gonna be really exciting. We're talking about everything you need to have a successful tech stack, and best practices, to be successful in your role for 2026. And then we are also doing a joint webinar with Dayforce, who is an HR platform. So if you are looking to align your HR and your finance teams, definitely check out that webinar as well, and all of those links can be found in the docs chat. Lots of good stuff coming up. Perfect. Well, still no questions coming in here, guys, but easy. we'll go ahead. And if if any come in, we'll still see them so we can reach out separately. But I wanna just say thank you all to everybody who was able to join us. Thank you, Mike and Landon, for providing, such valuable content. And if that is all, I'm gonna go ahead and let our speakers go here, and we, hope to. see you guys in our March webinars. Thanks, everyone. Thanks, guys.