Mehiläinen improved purchase invoice processing with AI

Mehiläinen has worked hard on developing its financial administration over the past few years. They have renewed their financial systems, implemented new integrations, and they’ve even started considering robotics.

In this wave of modernization, Mehiläinen decided to implement Snowfox.AI in 2019. After one year of using it, Development Manager Roope Rauhalinna says:

“I’m proud that we’ve been among the first to hop on board this train and use AI to automate our purchase invoice process.”

Speeding up the purchase invoice processing

One of the challenges Mehiläinen had was to get all invoices handled before their due dates. One of Mehiläinen’s goals for Snowfox.AI was to speed up the invoice handling process and cycle. Mehiläinen also wanted to cut down on manual administrative tasks and minimize errors in the business units.

Both goals were reached. Artificial intelligence also sped up the process of closing the accounts. AI added posting suggestions to invoices that were missing the posting and approval information. This lightened the bookkeepers’ manual workload significantly. This is a huge achievement in a corporation that consists of over 80 individual companies.

Smooth cooperation is the cornerstone of success

The results Mehiläinen has achieved would not have been possible without active and open communication between Snowfox and Mehiläinen. When piloting an entirely new service, communication is crucial for the success of the pilot.

”We are really pleased with the customer support and service in general. Things have gone really well overall with the people from Snowfox.AI.”

AI automation frees up time from accounts payable

Previously, the purpose of accounts payable was to figure out the invoice auditor from the contents of the invoice. But then Mehiläinen implemented the automatic routing with artificial intelligence. Now Mehiläinen routes around 90% of invoices automatically thanks to Snowfox.AI.

“We get invoices from a fragmented field of invoicers, and the contents of invoices vary a lot. Due to this, we couldn’t make automatic routing work on the desired level. AI has really exceeded our expectations, and significantly decreased all manual work related to accounts payable,” Rauhalinna explains.

Purchase invoice processing is well-suited for AI automation

Mehiläinen quickly realized that the handling of purchase invoices is an ideal task for artificial intelligence. This is because the process is generic and includes large amounts of data and repetitions. Tasks like that can easily be automated.

“These characteristics make these tasks the best suited to be automated first,” explains Rauhalinna. 

There are other reasons too. The handling of purchase invoices requires a lot of manual work, both in accounts payable and the business units. It’s usually the most time-consuming task in financial administration. AI saves multiple euros per purchase invoice.

Rauhalinna values working with Snowfox on an ongoing basis. If they were to handle the job on their own, there would be a risk that the development would stop.

Working with Snowfox.AI, Mehiläinen is also able to further develop as a company.

“This way, we can focus on automating other administrative tasks, because we aren’t running out of those any time soon”, laughs Rauhalinna.

Read more customer success stories:

• Bravedo’s artificial intelligence journey
• Renta’s artificial intelligence journey