Rethinking shared services for the AI era
If you run shared services, you understand the reality of growing invoice volumes, tighter controls, and increasing complexity. Moving past traditional approaches is a must. Most automation tools were designed to handle tasks, not decisions. They automate workflows but can't adapt to the complexity, context, and compliance demands of global finance. AI-first companies change that by delivering intelligence that evolves with your systems instead of requiring you to replace them.
As finance operations expand globally, leaders are reevaluating how to strike a balance between scale, compliance, and agility without incurring additional costs. They must deliver consistent service quality across multiple business units and regions, even as transaction volumes continue to rise and cost pressures intensify. They need to maintain strict compliance with diverse local regulations and company policies. And they need to do all of this while standardizing processes enough to drive scale without losing the agility required to adapt to regional and business-specific needs.
Even with today's AP automation tools, much of invoice processing is still manual. Teams spend hours resolving exceptions, verifying tax data, and chasing suppliers for missing details. Similar manual effort is required in travel and expense (T&E) management, where teams review receipts, validate policies, and track reimbursements, often across multiple currencies and languages. Rules-based systems break whenever data or formats vary, leaving analysts to fill the gaps. As a result, "automation" often covers only a small portion of the process, while the manual work continues to drain time and resources.
By the numbers
80%
autonomous processes across expense audit and accounts payable
95%
reduction in manual review
100%
transaction coverage with real-time auditing
5%
savings on total expense spend with AI-powered compliance
The costs of manual processing include:
- $10.18 average cost to process a single invoice manually
- 30% of business revenue lost due to operational inefficiencies
- 87% of finance professionals work overtime to finish monthly closes
AI-driven automation presents an opportunity to redefine how finance operates. Shared services teams can use this technology to turn scale into a strength, improving accuracy, accelerating processes, and generating measurable business value.
The AI-Powered foundation for Shared Services
AppZen's platform delivers eight essential capabilities that transform global finance operations:
- Multilingual translation and global processing
- Comprehensive global tax capability
- Simplified exception handling and configurable compliance
- Centralized GBS invoice management
- Unified e-invoicing management
- Accounting standards compliance (US GAAP/IFRS)
- Advanced reporting and analytics
- Comprehensive KPI framework
Together, these capabilities enable shared services organizations to scale efficiently while maintaining compliance and control across every market.
The eight capabilities defining next-generation shared services
AppZen provides the AI foundation shared services leaders need to transform finance operations at scale. Purpose-built for global teams, it combines deep financial intelligence with automation that adapts to diverse markets, languages, and compliance requirements. AppZen enables shared services organizations to deliver consistent, compliant, and cost-efficient results worldwide.
1. Multilingual translation and global processing
Problem: Global finance teams struggle with invoice processing delays caused by language barriers, requiring translation support and creating timezone bottlenecks that slow down AP operations across international markets.
Solution: Extract and verify 100% of invoice data across 40+ languages and in any document type.
AppZen's AI constantly learns from language-specific invoice patterns, enabling 24/7 global processing without timezone constraints or translation delays. This removes processing holdups caused by language barriers and reduces reliance on translation support, allowing shared services teams to handle invoices and vendor communications in multiple languages from one unified platform.
2. Comprehensive global tax capability
Problem: Complex international regulations and e-invoice mandates require dedicated compliance staff, creating scalability challenges, compliance risks, and audit readiness concerns.
Solution: Verify invoices against international regulations, including e-invoice mandates, VAT rules, tax requirements, and vendors across agencies like OFAC.
AppZen's Autonomous AP, with built-in regulatory frameworks, automatically adheres to local requirements across jurisdictions, eliminating the need for dedicated compliance staff in each market. AI identifies and extracts tax information from invoices of any format or origin, ensuring complete audit readiness and reducing compliance risk through consistent, automated regulatory adherence.
Across the globe, governments are implementing increasingly complex tax and e-invoicing requirements, which pose significant challenges for finance and shared services teams responsible for ensuring compliance on a large scale.
A comprehensive global tax capability, powered by AI-driven automation, can turn this challenge into an opportunity. By automatically capturing, validating, and reconciling invoice data across multiple jurisdictions, organizations can reduce errors, fraud, and disputes while speeding up approval and tax credit processes.
AppZen's Autonomous AP solutions boost AP efficiency by 80% and process invoices within one day.
The benefits are substantial: lower operational costs, improved control over working capital, and enhanced audit readiness. As regulatory scrutiny increases, shared services leaders who leverage intelligent automation can transform tax compliance from a reactive requirement into a proactive driver of efficiency, transparency, and growth.
3. Simplified exception handling and configurable compliance
Problem: Traditional AP workflows are rigid and dependent on IT for every change, preventing finance teams from adapting to new regulations and business requirements.
Solution: Build complex workflows through an intuitive interface with simple dropdown menus.
AppZen's DIY (do-it-yourself) automations simplify QR code processing and custom exception routing, and automate notifications via Slack or email when additional information is needed.
Modern finance organizations are transitioning from rigid, IT-driven workflows to configurable, low-code approaches, enabling business teams to design and manage exception handling and compliance rules.
Instead of depending on developers to make hard-coded changes, low-code tools empower non-technical users to create and adjust workflows for tasks like routing exceptions, validating data against policies, or creating approval chains based on spend category or risk level.
By embedding compliance rules and audit trails directly into these workflows, every exception is automatically validated, documented, and escalated to the appropriate stakeholder, enhancing accuracy, transparency, and efficiency.
This self-service model allows organizations to quickly adapt to regulatory changes, new business requirements, and evolving risk profiles while reducing manual intervention and operational costs. The outcome is a more agile and scalable compliance framework that reinforces governance without compromising efficiency.
4. Centralized GBS invoice management
Problem: Global Business Services (GBS) organizations face difficult invoice processing across business units, languages, and currencies, leading to duplicated effort, policy changes, and overall difficulty scaling operations.
Solution: Centralize and manage invoices, approvals, and reporting across subsidiaries while supporting complex organizational structures with multiple entities, currencies, and languages.
AppZen's AI adapts to standardized policies while allowing business-unit-specific rules and exceptions without sacrificing the necessary flexibility.
Global Business Services (GBS) organizations are constantly challenged to deliver consistent, high-quality finance and invoice processing across various business units, languages, currencies, and locations. By centralizing invoice management within GBS, standardized processing, uniform oversight, and policy enforcement can be achieved, ensuring quality control while also allowing for local flexibility.
Key benefits include:
Standardized operations and controls: Central systems enforce consistent rules, approvals, and controls across all units, while also accommodating regional or business-unit specific variations when necessary.
Risk reduction and compliance: Centralized visibility and automation help flag anomalies and policy violations early on. This improves audit readiness, as every invoice is subjected to the same compliance checks.
Efficiency and cost savings: Centralized management of high-volume, routine invoice tasks leads to reduced processing time, lower error rates, and economies of scale in staffing and overhead costs. Reported improvements include an 80% increase in efficiency and a roughly 30% reduction in costs when invoice operations are centralized and automated.
Scalability and Agility: A centralized framework allows for easier expansion by adding new legal entities, locations, or languages, with minimal rework. Updates to policies or compliance requirements can be deployed uniformly, thus avoiding fragmentation of processes.
This model offers a foundation for GBS to move from manual and fragmented invoice handling to centralized and automated controls. By doing so, it reduces risk while also improving the consistency and speed of finance operations globally.
5. Unified e-invoicing management
Problem: Government e-invoicing mandates across different jurisdictions create an unnecessary amount of formats, portals, and compliance rules that overwhelm the AP team with rejected invoices, supplier inquiries, and manual intervention.
Solution: Identify e-invoicing documents as soon as they enter your AP inbox and process them through compliance workflows.
AppZen's e-invoicing capabilities handle diverse e-invoicing formats, with automated QR code validation and country-specific compliance measures.
E-invoicing is now becoming the backbone of global AP teams' operations. Governments from the EU to India are mandating e-invoices to improve tax collection, reduce fraud, and increase transparency.
However, these mandates bring a variety of local rules, formats, and portals that can be overwhelming even for well-trained AP teams. Each jurisdiction requires its own compliance, validation, and integration strategy. For shared services leaders, this results in more supplier inquiries, rejected invoices, manual intervention, and an increasing compliance risk.
In a single day in the AP department, you might encounter a German invoice that cannot be processed due to a formatting mismatch. Soon after, invoices from Italy and Romania are rejected for not adhering to different rules. Supplier emails flood the teams, and leadership is requesting compliance reports.
This chaotic situation is common for AP teams as they grapple with various standards in multiple markets. AppZen replaces this manual, fragmented approach with a single, AI-powered platform designed for global scale.
Our technology:
- Manages diverse e-invoicing formats, from India's Invoice Reference Number (IRN) system to the EU's EN 16931 standard, with automated QR code validation and country-specific compliance checks.
- Integrates directly with tax authorities and government portals, ensuring every invoice is validated and transmitted correctly without manual intervention.
- Keeps up with regulatory changes automatically, reducing IT workload and future-proofing your compliance infrastructure.
- Provides a single, global dashboard to monitor invoice status, compliance risk, and exception alerts in real time.
Shared services leaders gain a unified, future-ready e-invoicing process. Eliminating the need to constantly address rejected invoices and keep up with regulatory changes means your team can shift focus to nurturing supplier relationships and driving strategic initiatives.
6. Accounting standards compliance (US GAAP/IFRS)
Problem: Maintaining compliance with US GAAP, IFRS, and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), requires comprehensive audit trails and consistent controls across entities, which are difficult to achieve manually.
Solution: Automate accounting controls and compliance across US GAAP, SOX, and IFRS standards, ensuring audit readiness, accuracy, and consistency across all entities.
AppZen supports US GAAP, IFRS, and SOX compliance by maintaining detailed audit trails and enabling automated workflows that strengthen internal control frameworks.
While GAAP rules for preparing financial reports doesn't require an audit trail, maintaining one helps demonstrate compliance.
AppZen's AI capabilities provide auditors with risk assessments, flag policy violations, identify repeat offenders, and detect potentially fraudulent transactions. For IFRS support, the system enables multi-entity reporting for consolidated financial statements and provides fair value measurement support through enhanced analytics.
Detailed analytics offers reporting on cost savings, efficiency gains, and service improvements, helping demonstrate clear value to internal stakeholders and external auditors while ensuring consistent application of accounting policies across all business units.
7. Advanced reporting and analytics
Problem: Finance teams lack real-time visibility into spending patterns, risks, and compliance issues, relying on manual reporting processes that delay decision-making.
Solution: Turn financial data into real-time insights with advanced reporting and AI analytics.
Users should be able to ask questions in natural language to surface trends, visualize results, and identify risks or duplicate payments, ensuring accuracy and transparency across financial operations.
AppZen's interactive analytics allows you to ask questions in natural language, to quickly surface insights through custom visualizations and drill-downs. Finance professionals can analyze spending patterns without technical expertise, create ad-hoc reports for stakeholder requests, and identify emerging trends and compliance risks in real-time. The platform turns operational data into automated insights across organizations, eliminating manual reporting and enabling teams to make faster, better decisions.
In addition to traditional reporting, AppZen provides prescriptive analytics that offer insights to evaluate policy improvements and coach employee spending behavior, including detailed suggestions based on historical transaction patterns.
Organizations can schedule automated reports for regular stakeholder distribution, download data for deeper analysis in external tools, share PDF reports directly with stakeholders via email, and create custom dashboards tailored to specific business unit needs.
8. Comprehensive KPI framework
Problem: Shared services organizations struggle to measure and demonstrate the operational efficiency, financial impact, and compliance effectiveness of their financial operations with traditional sampling-based audit approaches.
Solution: Enable shared services organizations to measure performance across operational efficiency, financial impact, and compliance effectiveness.
While this paper focuses primarily on AP, the insights and capabilities described about Flight Centre Canada apply equally to both AP and Expense Audit operations. AppZen's platform improves operational efficiency by reducing processing time from days to hours while achieving a 100% transaction audit rate, compared to the traditional 5-10% sampling rates. AppZen customer Flight Centre Canada showcased these capabilities by reducing the number of accountants from 40 spending 5 hours monthly to 1 accountant spending 2 hours monthly, resulting in a 95% reduction in manual review requirements.
The financial impact includes up to a 50% immediate processing cost reduction with real-time duplicate payment prevention and a 5% savings on total T&E spend through policy enforcement. The platform also captures automated early payment discounts and eliminates late fees through optimized payment timing.
For compliance and risk management, AppZen achieves over 99%+ accuracy in detecting policy violations through real-time monitoring of FCPA, Sunshine Act, and local regulations. The platform offers comprehensive audit trail documentation for all transactions, ongoing monitoring, and enhancement of organizational risk profiles.
Flight Centre Canada by the numbers
95%
reduction in manual review
50%
cost savings
5%
savings on total T&E spend through policy enforcement
Pre-built, customizable dashboards and AI analyses provide business users with essential key performance indicators and metrics, facilitating data-driven decision-making at all levels of the organization.
Enterprise value delivered
The immediate benefits of implementing AppZen's finance AI include reduced manual processing time and improved compliance accuracy, faster vendor payments and enhanced relationships, increased visibility into global operations, and elimination of duplicate payments and late fees.
The strategic value extends beyond immediate operational improvements. AppZen enables scalable operations without proportional headcount increases, addressing the fundamental challenge that volumes rise while budgets stay flat. The platform standardizes processes across all business units while maintaining the flexibility required for local operations. Data-driven insights support continuous improvement initiatives, and the platform's AI-first architecture ensures organizations remain ready for emerging compliance requirements.
AppZen provides detailed analytics and reporting on cost savings, efficiency gains, and service improvements, helping demonstrate clear ROI to stakeholders while maintaining audit readiness.
The platform's comprehensive KPI framework enables shared services leaders to justify investments, measure performance improvements, and communicate value to executive stakeholders with concrete, quantifiable metrics.
The new model for shared services
These eight capabilities represent the foundation for next-generation shared services operations: multilingual processing, global tax compliance, DIY exception handling, centralized GBS management, unified e-invoicing, audit-ready compliance, advanced analytics, and comprehensive KPI frameworks. AppZen's AI-powered platform reimagines how shared services organizations deliver consistent, compliant, and cost-effective financial operations globally.
The transformation is measurable, immediate, and sustainable. As one finance leader stated, "Instead of spending 90% of their time on data entry, our team members are now subject matter experts in the procure-to-pay process. They can identify and solve problems, even beyond AP's traditional scope."
Shared services leaders understand the relentless nature of the math. Exceptions and policy checks consume analyst hours, the cost per transaction remains fixed, and traditional strategies like adjusting headcount and offshoring have reached their limits.
The real question for SSOs is no longer whether AI will revolutionize operations, but whether their leaders will spearhead this transformation, or risk being overtaken by competitors who adopt these capabilities sooner.