RSMUS.comToday’s family offices must contend with rising expectations, increasing competition, and significant economic uncertainty. In response, they’re embracing AI, with three times more firms using AI for operations in 2025 than in the previous year. By automating essential but labor-intensive administrative functions, family offices not only reduce errors and inefficiency but also free up resources to focus on more strategic or sensitive responsibilities.
Accounts payable is one area where there’s still significant room for improvement. However, AP automation is now poised to take a significant step forward thanks to AI.
Many family offices have automated small parts of the payment processes already. But now AP can run on autopilot like never before, with major implications not just for professionals responsible but for the entire accounting and finance function.
We’re entering a golden era of AP for the family offices with the right solutions in place.
Sage Intacct – Bringing AI to Accounts Payable
Sage Intacct has operated at the intersection of accounting, finance, and AI for years now, finding innovative yet practical ways to improve financial processes with cutting-edge technology. A number of new AI-driven features have been introduced recently, designed to improve accounts payable, accounts receivable, and other fundamental accounting processes.
These features have made Sage Intacct into one of the most AI-rich financial management platforms on the market, especially compared to other family office accounting solutions. Much more importantly, AI has made an already strong accounts payable tool even better equipped to save time, energy, and errors while unleashing efficiency, insight, and revenue.
AI is transforming accounts payable as we know it, with Sage Intacct setting the new standard.
Accounts Payable Automation in Action
It takes at least a few minutes (and sometimes upwards of 10) to turn each invoice the AP team receives into a draft bill in the accounting system. And since this process relies on a person moving the data manually, at least a few percent of those draft bills will contain errors (and sometimes major mistakes).
Multiply those totals by hundreds or potentially thousands of bills incoming each month, and the AP process requires significant amounts of time while creating dangerous degrees of risk. Take people out of the equation, however, and both issues are eliminated.
Sage Intacct now comes standard with a powerful tool that uses AI and ML to automate the most labor-intensive part of accounts payable. Basically, the AP automation tool takes the bills you receive and automatically turns them into draft bills in Sage Intacct. Here’s how it works:
- Upload Invoices: You can upload bills into the system in a variety of formats: PDF, JPEG, PNG. Or you can send them to a dedicated email address as attachments and they will be uploaded automatically. Having vendors submit invoices to that address creates a direct pipeline for bills to enter Sage Intacct.
- Automate Analysis: The AI in Sage Intacct pulls the details out of each invoice and enters them into a draft bill. It identifies the vendor, and you have the option to list each line item, along with the corresponding dimensions, or just the total. This process takes seconds or less, and even large batches of invoices get analyzed and transcribed quickly.
- Review Results: AI handles the heavy lifting, but humans have final approval over all draft bills. Sage Intacct displays the original invoice directly beside the AI-generated draft, making it easy to review the results and spot discrepancies. You can make any necessary edits before posting the bill and maintain oversight over a process that still needs a human in the loop.
- Expect Improvements: As you edit AI-generated draft bills, machine learning records what went wrong and makes changes to improve the AI. It gets better at navigating different bill layouts, correctly transcribing information, matching bills to vendor records, and selecting GL codes and dimensions. Over time, you need to make fewer edits and enjoy the benefits of an AP process where information moves accurately, efficiently, and automatically in large part.
Start Using AP Automation Immediately
Using AI to create invoices instead of doing it manually really is a game-changing feature for family offices. Best of all, anyone with Sage Intacct can start using this feature now, at no extra change, and with minimal training and setup.
The most important AP advancement in years or decades is now accessible to all. Contact RSM about enabling AP automation on your Sage Intacct deployment.
