Tech News: Stampli releases 'Unusual Invoice Alert' feature

June 30, 2023 9:00 AM

Stampli releases 'Unusual Invoice Alert' feature; Corvee announces release of "Instead" and "Instead Pro" for R&D credits; and other accounting technology news.

Stampli releases free Unusual Invoice Alert feature

Colinda McKie/stock.adobe.com

Accounts payable solutions provider Stampli has added an Unusual Invoice Alert feature, which provides an early warning system for invoices that deviate from the historical trend. Stampli implemented the feature in response to its own experience of being blindsided by a software vendor that more than quadrupled the cost of an annual software subscription. This feature, which is included free for all Stampli customers, automatically calculates historical invoice patterns for any vendor. If a new invoice significantly exceeds a certain threshold, the feature automatically alerts up to five designated recipients. Stampli's communication tools are integrated with the invoice, enabling AP and team members to ask and answer questions directly alongside historical invoices, vendor documents, signed agreements and any other relevant information. These tools can be used to bring external vendors into the same conversation for a complete audit trail about the issue and how it was resolved.

Corvee announces release of “Instead” and “Instead Pro” for R&D credits

Tax strategy software provider Corvee released its new Instead and Instead Pro products, which use AI to optimize the use of R&D credits. Users of the Instead platform can leverage AI to help identify and document qualified projects for R&D tax credits. The software facilitates the entire process — from estimating tax savings and calculating final credit amounts for tax preparation to implementing and substantiation for the credit. Meanwhile, the Instead Pro version is designed specifically for accountants. It is a step-by-step platform providing the tools and resources needed to help their clients access R&D tax credits. Pricing for both products starts at $16 per month, and pricing for accounting firms starts at just $9 per month per entity. In a departure from industry norms, Corvee is offering firms the option to have their clients sign up and pay for the product themselves.

Salesforce launches SASB Report Builder

Salesforce sign on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange

Michael Nagle/Bloomberg

Salesforce released its new SASB Report Builder for Net Zero Cloud. The new feature automates the disclosure of environmental, social, and governance data in alignment with the International Financial Reporting Standards Foundation's SASB Standards, which identify ESG issues most relevant to enterprise financial performance and value. The SASB Report Builder will be able to generate ESG reports across 14 industries in four key sectors: consumer goods, financials, services, and technology and communications. Further, it expands on Salesforce's Automate ESG Reporting, which enables companies to manage ESG data in real time and generate framework-specific reports. It will also leverage the native AI capacities of Net Zero Cloud to deliver actionable reports, forecasting and visual dashboards to enable companies to identify areas of inefficiencies and high emissions to create tangible plans to become more sustainable.

Cobalt Iron patents automated remediation tech

Kirill Ivanov/WrightStudio - Fotolia

Cobalt Iron, a SaaS data protection company, received a patent for its proactive technology for automated remediation of cyber and storage events. U.S. Patent 11636207, issued on April 25, describes new techniques that will be implemented in Cobalt Iron Compass, an enterprise SaaS backup platform. The technology enables automated health remediation of various failures and conditions affecting storage devices and backup operations. It allows users to determine the interdependencies between various hardware and software components of a backup environment; monitor for conditions in local or remote storage repositories that may affect local backups, including storage device warnings or failure, indications of a cyber attack, security alert conditions, and environmental conditions such as severe weather, fire or flood; identify data that might be affected by the device's health issue; dynamically reconfigure backup operations and the backup architecture to direct backup data to a different target storage repository (remote or in a cloud) that is unaffected by the condition; automatically extend retention periods for backup data or backup media associated with data possibly affected by device health issues; automatically initiate additional backup or replication operations for data possibly affected by device health issues; and automatically initiate data integrity checking on data possibly affected by device health issues.

Ironscales beta tests generative AI security

Cybersecurity solutions firm Ironscales announced the beta launch of Themis Co-pilot for Microsoft Outlook, a GPT-powered chat assistant for self-service threat reporting based on the PhishLLM, the first in the Ironscales suite of generative AI apps for email security. Users can ask it to evaluate suspicious emails and gain real-time actionable insights to report threats and take a more active part in threat hunting. As end-users leverage Themis Co-pilot to report on emerging threats, proper classification will automatically remediate similar threats across the environment and train the Ironscales machine learning element to look for these threats in the future. Themis AI utilizes the data from millions of security events from users, devices and threat intelligence signals, in a continuous reinforcement learning from human feedback cycle. Adding to this data set are human insights collected from every mailbox user and over 20,000 security analysts across the Ironscales network of global administrators.

Avalara announces return of NEXT: virtual event for software devs

Avalara CEO Scott McFarlane, center, points to a monitor during the company's IPO at the New York Stock Exchange

Michael Nagle/Bloomberg

Tax software company Avalara announced the return of its NEXT event, a virtual event for developers and partners. The virtual conference will take place Sept. 20–21,
2023. The event is free. It will feature talks from technical leaders like Avalara CTO Danny Fields, as well as representatives from companies like BigCommerce, eBay, GoDaddy, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce and Xero, who will share partner success stories. Attendees will be able to learn about new and enhanced global APIs and integrations from Avalara to drive value and efficiencies for their customers, watch live coding demonstrations, learn how to build a tax integration for their business application in hours, and connect with Avalara technical experts for in-depth conversations.

Ledgible touts new NFT Suite

An illuminated neon sign of an NFT displayed in Hong Kong

Bloomberg

Crypto-accounting solutions provider Ledgible announced its new NFT Suite for dealing with non-fungible tokens. The NFT Suite is positioned as a module in Ledgible's tax and accounting suite. It gives funds, firms, investors, institutions and professionals native access to their Ethereum-based NFT portfolios. The platform tracks and automatically presents realized and unrealized gain and loss data for NFTs, alongside floor price and cost. Ledgible also works with tax information reporting professionals to provide 1099s for exchanges, protocols and businesses in the digital asset space.

MarginEdge releases AP tool for restaurant accountants

MarginEdge, a restaurant management and bill payment platform, announced the release of [me] finance, an AP automation tool specifically for accountants and bookkeepers who work in the restaurant industry. The tool features automated invoice processing via scans, emails or photos; visual budget tracking, controllable P&L statements, category reports and sales data; the ability to move invoices from "approved" to "paid" in as few as two business days and automatic syncing with the accounting system; the ability to pick from over 55,000 industry-specific vendors or enroll their own vendors in electronic payments; check writing and sending; automatic vendor credit tracking; multi-unit management; and point-of-sale integration with major accounting software. The new product is available exclusively to bookkeeping and accounting firms for a flat fee of $100 per month per restaurant client based on an annual subscription.

Partnerships and integrations

Catalis, a government-focused payment solutions provider, was selected by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to provide payment solutions for over 60 state agencies. … Crowe-affiliated accounting association CPAmerica has named alliantTalent as a new Preferred Provider for the association. This new partnership provides member firms with access to alliantTalent's audit, tax, advisory and client accounting services. … Procurement, payment and close solutions provider Airbase has integrated with travel management platform TravelPerk, which will allow businesses to connect to TravelPerk from their Airbase account, define travel policies, set booking cost limits, and assign Airbase-supported virtual or physical cards for travel bookings. … Travel technology company Amadeus has partnered with spend optimization solutions provider Emburse: Amadeus will promote Emburse Chrome River as a recommended integrated expense management offering to corporations in the United States and specific markets in Europe (U.K., Scandinavia and Benelux), while Emburse will add Cytric Travel and Cytric Easy for Microsoft Teams to its portfolio of travel spend optimization solutions. … Intuit, the company behind TurboTax, QuickBooks and many other products, is partnering with OpenAI, the organization behind the ChatGPT bot, to accelerate generative AI-driven application development on its proprietary GenAI-operating system. Intuit's financial large language models are enriched with the company's own data, which specialize in solving tax, accounting, marketing, cash flow and personal finance challenges. These financial LLMs determine the capabilities needed from Intuit's platform, data and knowledge set to create personalized experiences to guide consumers and small business customers with their financial lives. Combined with OpenAI's GPT 3.5 and 4.0, Intuit GenOS is enabling Intuit developers to build GenAI-powered experiences across its portfolio of fintech products. … Enterprise software company Sage is expanding its partnership with Amazon Web Services. U.S. customers will, for the first time, being able to access Sage Intacct on AWS.

Other news

aret, the automation solutions provider formerly called Abacus Next, added two new members to its executive team: Joanna Trimble, who has joined the company as chief revenue officer of Caret and president of HotDocs, and Charlie Anderson, who has joined the company as head of partnerships. … Ideagen, the accounting solutions company behind AuditAnalytics, announced the release of its new U.S. Disclosure GAAP Checklist product for Ideagen Disclose. This is in addition to the company's International Disclose and U.K. Disclose products. The solution boasts process automation capacities, a built-in review and approval process, traceability and assurance, plus a support team of accounting experts. … Fintech company ForwardAI announced the launch of the Forwardly Partner Program, which offers rewards to accountants, bookkeepers and financial professionals who refer business to Forwardly, a real-time payments solution for small businesses in the U.S. The program awards $100 for each business onboarded to Forwardly and receives $200 through the platform. ... Technology solutions provider Net at Work has acquired the customer base of the Meadville, Pennsylvania office of CPA firm Baker Tilly US LLP. Under the agreement, Net at Work will provide ongoing services and support for Baker Tilly's existing Sage 100 customers in the region. … Finance automation fintech Ramp has acquired Cohere.io, an AI chatbot customer support platform. The company has been using generative AI and LLMs since before the advent of ChatGPT to extract companies' historical customer support data and apply it to similar questions in the future. At Ramp, Cohere.io's team will lead projects developing AI to uncover opportunities for customers. Initial projects include making workflows more automated by completing multi-step processes on behalf of customers, as well as improving Ramp's ability to analyze unstructured and structured data to get the best price on software. … Pilot, a startup focused accounting firm, announced the release of its new Pilot GPT solution, built on the latest generative AI technology from OpenAI to further improve Pilot's accounting services. Pilot GPT will become widely available this quarter to all Pilot customers. … LeaseQuery, a lease accounting solutions provider, was named the best Best Compliance Solution of 2023 as part of the annual SIIA CODiE Awards. The CODiE Awards recognize the companies producing the most innovative business technology products across the country and around the world. … Vertex, a tax software provider, said its Indirect Tax Chain Flow Accelerator product has achieved SAP certification as integrated with RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud.