⚠️ This feature is available with the Scale or Enterprise plan. Please contact your CS manager or our support if you wish to benefit from this automation feature.
Table of content:
What is Machine Learning (ML), and how do we apply it for the automation of expense and VAT account entries?
Definition of ML
"Machine learning is a branch of artificial intelligence (AI) and computer science which focuses on the use of data and algorithms to imitate the way that humans learn, gradually improving its accuracy." (Source, IBM 2020, What is Machine Learning?)
How do we apply ML for the automation of expense and VAT account entries?
The new ML feature leverages your historical bookkeeping data to predict expense & VAT account entries in 'Bookkeep>Prepare'.
Key characteristics of this ML feature:
It takes all relevant data points into consideration (e.g. supplier, analytic fields, cost center, amount, description and more...) and tries to identify patterns. The models behind this feature are calculated and maintained on an individual basis for each Spendesk account to have the best possible prediction results!
It only proposes values when the confidence of a correct value is high!
The models behind this feature improve over time! This means that the models learn from mistakes and adapt their predictions to improve their accuracy!
How to benefit from the ML feature?
In general - the more you do your bookkeeping with Spendesk, the more predictions you are going to receive while realizing significant time savings during your closing process.
Once there is enough data to leverage - you will see that the ML feature is recommending you values for the expense & VAT account in 'Bookkeep>Prepare'.
How do you see that you benefit from predictions of the Machine Learning feature or other automation features?
With the implementation of the new ML feature, we also revamped the interface to clarify the sources of different automation features that can pre-fill your values for expense & VAT accounts.
The new magic borders (rainbow colors - see screenshot below 👇) highlight the fact that our automation features recommend values for you! On the other hand, grey borders represent manual entries or rule-based entries.
To clarify the automation for each field we implemented icons that explain the automation:
🤖 👉 ML feature for expense & VAT accounts and amounts
🤖 👉 OCR recommendations for VAT accounts and amounts
🔗 👉 Manual supplier rule and link with expense accounts
Editing a VAT account rule on a supplier
It is not "directly" possible to set up a VAT account rule. The automatic assignment of VAT accounts is done via our ML feature which tries to predict the VAT via an algorithm. You cannot change the predictions of the ML feature manually, but you can influence the predictions by entering a different VAT account for the same supplier several times.