Yooz Brings Cloud AP Automation to U.S. SMBs

Receive invoice. Approve invoice. Pay invoice.

On paper, it seems like a simple process. Yet, the demands on a small business owner’s time and competing priorities often turn the accounts payable (AP) process into a nightmare that sometimes leaves angry suppliers in its wake.

Yooz, a cloud-based document management services provider, aims to help small and midsized businesses (SMBs) streamline their AP workflow. Launching today in North America from its U.S. headquarters in Southlake, Texas, Yooz frees shop owners, workers and bookkeepers from hours of handling, processing and filing invoices.

Hours that are better spent delivering great customer experiences, asserts Yooz President and Chairman, Didier Charpentier.

Automating Accounts Payable

For the typical small business, receiving a supplier invoice sets off a slow-motion chain reaction that can involve lengthy stints behind a keyboard, document hand-offs, and at every turn an opportunity for mistakes to happen.  “All these processes are very manual, cumbersome and complex,” Charpentier told Small Business Computing.

Businesses in the U.S., both big and small, largely cling to manual, paper-based AP processes. Yooz estimates that less than a third of American businesses have automated the vital business function, amounting to a huge opportunity for both behind-the-times SMBs and cloud vendors that cater to the growing market for AP automation.

“It’s a $1.6 billion market with a projected annual growth rate of 12 percent. The SME [small and medium enterprise] market is ripe for disruption—particularly where companies still rely on paper and manual entry, losing time and money on every transaction,” a Yooz spokesperson said.

Yooz simplifies matters by leveraging document-based business process automation software from its European parent company, ITESOFT. After providing its efficiency-boosting expertise to big enterprises such as Toshiba, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Ernst & Young, Yooz now turns its attention to SMBs.

Built-in intelligence extracts information from documents sent as email attachments or scanned to Yooz. The cloud-based AP automation solution also accepts document images that are snapped with a smartphone camera.

Behind the scenes, Yooz provides end-to-end, no-touch AP processing and streamlining by automatically providing general ledger (GL) coding for accounting, compliance and approval purposes. Indexing capabilities help prevent duplicate billing and make documents searchable with a customizable “Google-like” search box.

With Yooz, rifling through file cabinets for a lost invoice is a thing of the past, says Charpentier. “File-based storage of electronic documents doesn’t get lost.”

Yooz supports all major accounting and enterprise resource planning (ERP) suites via connectors that link Yooz’s cloud to a company’s software setup. More than 50 business software platforms support Yooz, including small business favorite Inuit, according to Charpentier.

All told, Yooz frees up valuable time, he said. It also reduces costs. “Our customers reduce invoice processing costs by 70 percent,” he revealed in a statement. The company bases its rates on volume and doesn’t impose a flat rate that forces customers to pay for unused resources.

Yooz is available now for North American businesses.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at InfoStor. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.

Do you have a comment or question about this article or other small business topics in general? Speak out in the SmallBusinessComputing.com Forums. Join the discussion today!

Must Read

Get the Free Newsletter!

Subscribe to Daily Tech Insider for top news, trends, and analysis.