Where did it all begin?

What is FabricAI?

If someone were to ask us now, in 2021, how would we describe FabricAI, these are some of the things that come to our minds:

• Leading the way towards the future of accounting and financial administration
• Successful and reliable solutions
• Creating added value (and time!) for all customers
• Automated purchase invoice processing with the help of AI
• And first and foremost, an awesome workplace for our driven employees.

Doesn’t sound too bad, if we say so ourselves. But it has taken us a few steps to get in this position that we are currently in. While being proud of our accomplishments we would like to share the story of how did FabricAI actually become FabricAI.

Let’s go back to 2018 – the year where it all began.

FabricAI began from the same motives that are still relevant to us till this day. From a desire to create reliable solutions that ease and improve the customer’s operations. The vision of what this solution might be has evolved during the years – resulting in FabricAI and automated invoice processing.

Before automated purchase invoice processing at FabricAI, we developed a receipt scanner. With its help it was possible to analyze the content of different receipts.

The success of the receipt scanner lead to creating the company Tripper. Tripper had an app, and its goal was to automate and ease the travel invoice process with the help of AI. There was an AI based receipt scanner and a travel invoice side built into the app.

Making of travel invoices can generally be seen as something that is time-consuming, obligatory and an unavoidable task that you have to schedule in your already busy calendar. Tripper was able to do this time-consuming task on behalf of the customer and take the “pain” away from the process.

“The World’s Quickest Travel Invoice”

The customers could download the Tripper app to their phones, making the travel invoice process accessible no matter the time or place. The app also did prefilled travel invoices based on the customer’s calendar entries.

The automation of travel invoices received a lot of possible feedback from its customers and praise for how much the process of travel invoice processing had improved and expedited.

Based on the received positive feedback we wanted to develop the solution even further. We had noticed that many Tripper customers continued to ask the same question – could this solution be used for purchase invoices as well?

After thinking about it … why not!

With valuable feedback and user experiences in our pockets we started developing the solution forward towards automated purchase invoice processing.

As purchase invoice processing is one of the most time-consuming tasks of accounting, the development towards automating it, felt like a justifiable and natural step.

In addition to this, we had noticed that the accounting practices will be reshaping significantly during the upcoming years and that the old practices just wouldn’t work like they used to. The industry needed viable solutions to keep up with the development – and automation with the help of AI definitely fit the role.

With automated purchase invoice processing we could provide even more additional value to our customers and save their time towards more demanding tasks. AI could automate the accountant’s manual processes and thus boost the overall work performance.

And so the idea of FabricAI began to form in our minds

The first pilot for automated purchase invoice processing was made in 2018

Summer 2018 we had our first ever pilot for automated purchase invoice processing. The pilot included a big Finnish listed company, that handled over 10 000 purchase invoices per month. This experience was truly an important lesson for us, and we learned so much more of how the process of purchase invoices could be improved.

The pilot gave us valuable insights:

• We hadn’t expected that there would be so many different account options for bookkeeping entries.
• There was too little data available, so we needed more data and material
• The quality of the data had to be improved
• After these improvements the end result of the pilot showed that our AI was able to process 69 % of the purchase invoices correctly.

Nowadays, as a result of continuous improvement, FabricAI is able to post over 95 % of the purchase invoices correctly.  

The pilot was definitely a valuable chance for us to learn and improve our solution. During the pilot we learned the most by just boldly trying out different things and observing what works the best. But above all, the pilot gave us confidence and belief in our solution and especially for its future. Even as the receipt scanner was a successful and viable product, we decided that we wanted to give our everything towards the successful automated purchase invoice processing.

In 2019 FabricAI and automated purchase invoice processing officially began

And we’ve come a long way ever since.

Along the years FabricAI has grown bigger and we’ve gotten more inspiring colleagues to join our team. Together we have developed and improved our operations even further. Based on thrilled demand last year we released a new “AI in financial administration” course free for anyone interested. Now the course is even utilized in collaboration with different Universities of Applied Sciences in Finland.

Today we have over 1500 happy customers in Finland and in Norway and we continuously work towards providing more and more customers the best possible AI accounting solutions. FabricAI’s solution has received thanks especially for its easy implementation process and for the straightforward cooperation and assistance.

However, our work here is not finished. We plan to keep on working even harder towards automated accounting, making the solution the new normal in the field of accounting.

FabricAI’s goal is to offer customized automated accounting solutions to over 4000 companies by the end of the year. The change in accounting processes is happening right now and it’s not about to stop any time soon.

Could FabricAI’s automated purchase invoice processing fit your business as well? Let’s set up an online meeting and we’ll show you how easy automated invoice processing truly is!