Srinivasa Gudugundla

Senior Director, Business Technology & Transformation, LiveRamp

Supernova Award Category: 
Tech Optimization and Modernization
The Organization: 

LiveRamp is the leading data connectivity platform for the safe and effective use of data. Powered by core identity resolution capabilities and an unparalleled network, LiveRamp enables companies and their partners to better connect, control, and activate data to transform customer experiences and generate more valuable business outcomes. LiveRamp’s fully interoperable and neutral infrastructure delivers end-to-end addressability for the world’s top brands, agencies, and publishers.

The Problem: 

The manual accounts receivables collections rely on tedious and repetitive manual work that ties up valuable resources, and generates errors and exceptions. The legacy “human involvement” based processes are inefficient, error-prone, and often don’t provide adequate transactional visibility and predictive\prescriptive analytics. 

The month-end expense accruals process is highly manual and requires reaching out to suppliers, compiling PO and invoice data, and calculating accrual estimates. The data must be reviewed, posted to the GL, and subsequently reversed. The entries are highly manual and there is little visibility into the source of the expense accrual entries.

The Solution: 

Auditoria SmartFlow Skills for SmartCollections reduces manual steps and associated errors in the Invoice to Cash collections processes. It allows for automated classification and prioritization of receivables accounts, and bidirectional communications based on the state of the art in ML/NLU technologies. It also allows for a better ability to forecast cash flows.

Auditoria SmartGL Advanced Accruals for Suppliers centralizes the month-end expense accruals into one source of truth, compiles data, reaches out to suppliers, and drafts accrual entries. All of the accruals entries and supporting data are stored in the AAI platform and can be easily extracted and shared with internal and external audits.

The Results: 

Auditoria SmartFlow Skills for SmartCollections enables LiveRamp Accounts Receivable and Collections teams to improve the collections process and the business metrics such as DSO. It improves cash flow for an organization, and ultimately enables a better working capital posture.

 

Auditoria SmartFlow Skills for Accruals enable the LiveRamp Accounts Payable and Accounting team to execute the month’s close faster and more accurately.

Advanced Accrual for Suppliers allows the LiveRamp GL team to review entries all at once and be more efficient in their month-end close. The office of the Controller has better visibility into what the accruals are and how the estimates are supported. LiveRamp can use Auditoria data reporting to identify inconsistencies making month-end reviews faster. Internal and external audits have full visibility into the process with no manual time spent preparing audit workbooks.

Metrics: 

Using modern AI-powered optical character recognition, computer vision, and natural language understanding technologies, Auditoria reads, matches, stores, and processes evidentiary data faster and more comprehensively than traditional people-based techniques, reducing significant monthly costs. In addition to reducing rework and record verification by up to 20 percent, finance teams running Auditoria are also able to easily regain a minimum of eight hours per month per employee that would otherwise be spent on repetitive, non-value-added tasks. 

With rapid time to value, LiveRamp achieved results in days, not weeks or months, using automation with minimal IT dependence. Auditoria helped LiveRamp improve their DSO by more than 20 percent, reduce AR balances by more than 50 percent, eliminate bad debt by more than 75 percent, and gain back thousands of hours of efficiency and productivity to corporate finance teams.

The Technology: 

Purpose-built for finance, with advanced next-gen technology, Auditoria integrates with systems of record and email boxes to act as a system of engagement to streamline collections, add controls to procurement spend, optimize vendor management, and handle helpdesk inquiries using automation.

Disruptive Factor: 

A team of GL accountants spends many late nights every month closing the books. With Auditoria, the team finishes on time without working such long hours.

Shining Moment: 

Auditoria SmartCollections and SmartGL projects were spotlighted to the LiveRamp controller during monthly technology updates. The Business Technology & Transformation team is excited about using SmartBots to automate key processes and sees this technology as a differentiator as the business continues to grow.

About LiveRamp

Auditoria.AI automates business functions for vendor management, accounts payable and receivable, and accrual creation and management to accelerate cash performance. By leveraging NLP, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, Auditoria removes friction and repetition from mundane tasks while automating complex functions, and providing real-time visibility into cash performance.