- Glean.ai has launched its Automated Accruals solution to help finance teams more accurately report costs.
- The new offering is a feature of Glean.ai’s intelligent AP platform.
- The company made its Finovate debut last year at FinovateFall in New York.
Spend management solutions company Glean.ai has announced new functionality for its Intelligent AP platform. The company recently unveiled its Automated Accruals technology, which will help companies more accurately report costs.
“Managing accruals manually in spreadsheets and over email is very time-consuming, error-prone, and can lead to an inaccurate reporting of expenses,” Glean.ai Growth Marketing Manager Spencer Campbell noted in a company blog post. Campbell wrote that reconciling accrued expenses is one of the “most time-consuming parts” of any accountant’s close process. “They have to determine which costs have been incurred by their company that have not been invoiced yet,” Campbell explained, “if invoices have been received for prior accruals, and if prior estimates of costs incurred were sufficient.”
To this problem, Glean.ai has introduced Automated Accruals as the latest feature on its spend management platform. The enhancement works by alerting users to potential accruals based on either past billing patterns or budget expectations. This enables finance teams to consult directly with vendors to determine if services were performed and to secure estimates for costs. From here, users can record the expense amount, record date, and reversal date for the accrual. Glean.ai’s technology automatically syncs the entries to the user’s general ledger, and also features real-time reporting to ensure transparency and a comprehensive view of all accrued expenses whether they are booked or reversed.
The addition of automated accruals, according to Glean.ai, is an example of the smart automation that drives the firm’s innovations. The company uses the phrase “Intelligent AP” to describe its approach to leveraging the data that flows AP and accounting to automate processes and empower decision-making.
Howard Katzenberg (CEO), Ankur Patel (Head of Data), and Alexander Jia (Head of Product) co-founded Glean.ai in 2020. The company demoed its technology in its Finovate debut at FinovateFall in September of last year. At the conference, Katzenberg talked about how millions of small businesses inadvertently overspend when paying vendors. This occurs, Katzenberg said, due to errors or other costs that could be reduced or eliminated with greater scrutiny. “Fifteen percent of their cash is silently walking out the door,” he said. To this end, Glean.ai analyzes all of the business’ bills at the line item level. This enables the technology to track purchases, prices, and volumes, and deliver “timely, relevant, and actionable ways to save money.”
Katzenberg added, “There are many AP solutions that will help you pay your vendors quicker, but there are none that will help you pay your vendors less – until now.”
Glean.ai is headquartered in New York. The company has raised more than $10 million in funding from investors including Outpost Ventures and B Capital Group.