Accounts payable teams manage a constant flow of documents in every format, from paper invoices to purchase orders and receipts. Each coming with its own quirks, exceptions, and approval paths.
Add in the back-and-forth with supply chain and it’s easy for things to get stuck in email threads or phone calls that are hard to track.
Enter Yoga for FSM, a solution designed to handle that level of complexity and beyond. By bringing ingestion, processing, resolution, and reporting into one place, Yoga makes it easier for AP teams to keep work moving and to see exactly what’s happening at each step.
Join RPI Consultant’s Yoga Product Manager, Mason Auch, for a live walk-through of Yoga for FSM.
In this session, Mason will cover:
- Document and invoice OCR ingestion across formats for faster, more accurate capture
- Purchase invoice resolution that connects AP and supply chain in a visible process
- Reporting and dashboards that provide clear trends and actionable insights
- Yoga’s interface, customization, and integration with Infor FSM
See how Yoga for FSM helps AP teams handle complexity with clarity.
Transcript
Mason Auch
Good morning, everyone. Thank you so much for taking time out of your morning to attend our Yoga for FSM webinar today. We’re going to be focusing on our invoice solution. For those that don’t know me, my name is Mason Auch, and I am the Yoga product manager. I’m coming to you live from Kansas City — a bit of a rainy day here, but not too bad.
A little background on myself: I started with RPI about six and a half years ago, and I started off doing AP automation implementations — integrating a variety of AP automation tools on the market, primarily with Infor version 10. As a lot of our clients moved from version 10 to the cloud, we looked at the toolsets available in the market and landed on the conclusion that we weren’t really happy with what was out there for our large healthcare organizations. So we decided to build our own. About three and a half years ago, we launched our own product line — and now we get to do AP automation for many of our clients on Infor CloudSuite. I love AP. We spend a lot of time with our clients in the healthcare space, so you’ll hear me talk about that throughout.
A little about RPI Consultants in general: RPI has been guiding healthcare and local governments through AP invoice automation projects since 1999 — over 25 years of experience. With that, we have an A-plus team of certified consultants who understand all the nuances and intricacies of healthcare and local government, and really understand that back-office community. In a lot of these organizations — especially on the healthcare side — the focus tends to be on patient care. The back office doesn’t always get the attention it deserves, and that’s what we’re trying to change: making sure the back office has the tools to process invoices efficiently.
So what is Yoga for FSM? It’s a cloud-native, multi-tenant invoice processing tool. What we’re trying to do is bring invoices in from everywhere — paper, email, EDI, Excel files, and even new e-invoicing solutions — and run them through a single unified experience for AP teams. We’ve put a lot of focus on the integration with Infor CloudSuite, making sure that integration is extremely tight and doesn’t leave any gaps. Invoices are either in Yoga or they’re in Infor CloudSuite — specifically in the Manage Invoices section. We do not put anything into the DII (Document Invoice Interface) table or the MII (Match Invoice Interface) table. While those tools are powerful from Infor, by building our own deep integration and going through each action individually, we gain much more control over how invoices come over and how your business processes those invoices. That’s what’s really important when you have a consulting firm that built the software — we understand that each organization will have its own nuances, and we want our technology to support that.
Everyone wants to talk about AI, and it’s certainly a buzzword right now. What we try to do with Yoga is cut through the noise and give you a straightforward approach that actually delivers on what we’re promising. I’ll show more of that as we go.
I should have called this out at the beginning — if you have any questions as we go through this, please drop them in the chat. I’ll hold all questions until the end and work through them one by one.
At a high level, here’s where Yoga plays a role: invoice capture, intelligent data capture, and exceptions and workflow. From there, we hand off to Infor to handle things like buyer messages, approvals, and storage via Infor Document Management. What we’re not trying to do is replace Infor’s functionality. Some other AP automation solutions try to still do approvals or buyer messages in their own application. Our objective is to leverage where Infor is powerful and supplement it with Yoga where it isn’t. We scan invoices in, extract all the data, run it through data validation, handle exceptions in Yoga, and send everything else to Infor.
Security is extremely important to us. We do single sign-on so you don’t have to manage another username or password. We conduct annual SOC 2 audits, regular penetration testing, and we’re CSA STAR Level One certified. As organizations move to the cloud, we need to make sure our security is just as tight.
Another differentiator: Yoga is fully hosted and managed by RPI. That means we’re doing proactive management and tuning invoices on your behalf. What we saw consistently was that after an AP automation implementation, AP teams would be extremely happy for about nine months to a year — but then new vendors come on board, invoice formats change, and the straight-through processing rate starts to drop. Some organizations had internal resources who could handle the tuning, and those stayed relatively stable. But most of the time, getting IT’s attention or finding the specialized resources to do that tuning efficiently was a challenge. So we’ve built all of that into our offering. We also include baked-in support for modifications and enhancements. If you’ve acquired a new organization and need new processes, or you’re rolling out a new policy, that support is built in. This also reduces the risk of specialized turnover — if the IT resource who knew how to tune the intelligent capture leaves, we’re there to absorb that.
Everyone you work with on the Yoga side is both Infor FSM certified and an AP support specialist. That means the consultants you start with during implementation are the consultants you’ll work with throughout the entire engagement. There’s no handoff to a separate support team that doesn’t have context on your project.
As much as I could walk through slides all day, I love getting into the software. Let’s jump into Yoga now, walk through an invoice from start to finish, and cover some of the key features. We’ll come back to the slides at the end for reports.
This is the Yoga for FSM application. Here we’re in the All Invoices view, which shows all invoices across the entire application. I can see my queues — some in AP Review, some flagged as duplicates. These came in from an email mailbox this morning and are now ready for review. Let’s look at the AP Review queue first.
Here we have four invoices in the AP Review queue. In a real-world scenario, anything that stops would have a reason code explaining why, which makes it easy for AP teams to work through records efficiently. For our demo, straight-through processing is turned off so we can walk through these examples.
Say I’m an AP processor who’s particularly good at routing non-PO invoices to the right department. I can filter this list by the Missing Invoice Routing Category reason code and work only those records. That makes it really easy for individual team members to handle specific types of exceptions efficiently.
Let’s open up one of our non-PO invoices — the City of Fountain. When you open a record, the invoice image loads on the left and the form loads on the right. If I click into any field — the invoice number, for example — you’ll see it highlights the corresponding area in the invoice image in orange. That makes it very easy for AP processors to verify data against the image while working through the form.
Over here we have Primary Documents and Supporting Documentation. If I need to upload anything, I can drag files in directly. Both primary and supporting documentation will transfer over to Infor. In this example, the invoice was ingested from email — and in the Supporting Documentation section, we actually render the original email. Even though we tell vendors all day long not to include anything in the body, they often do — and that email body might tell us which department the invoice belongs to or include a PO number that wasn’t on the invoice itself. All of that is available without leaving the application.
We also have a pop-out window feature. You can drag the document viewer to a second monitor, and it stays in sync as you move through records. And from the actions menu in the top right, you can merge this document with another, split it, download the primary and supporting files, or send an email to the vendor — all from within Yoga.
On this record, what we’re missing is the invoice routing category. Our approach is to make sure the only touch point is here in Yoga. Anything needing an invoice routing category stops here; anything needing PO lines reworked stops here. I’ll select the routing category. I can type the department number and press Tab — it autofills from Infor’s synced data, so you can navigate the form quickly from the keyboard. I’ll save this and post it to Infor.
Coming back out to All Invoices, the record now shows as Awaiting Payment — meaning it successfully interfaced to Infor. If I pull it up in Infor directly, I can see our record with the invoice routing category we set — Financial Accounting — and both the invoice image and supporting documentation saved as PDFs. That way, for both AP and approvers, it’s easy to open in a clean new tab.
In a real-world scenario, we would also automatically submit this for approval. AP would only touch it in Yoga, it would come over to Infor, copy all the needed information, check for any additional errors, and then submit for approval — letting approvers handle the distribution.
Now let’s look at a PO invoice. Here we have a straight-through eligible record. If you had straight-through enabled, AP would never have seen this — it would have processed automatically. I’ve left it turned off for the demo. The form looks very familiar from what we just saw, but on a PO invoice, you’ll see PO lines at the bottom. Yoga extracted all the line data — quantities, item numbers, descriptions, unit prices — and matched it against the PO lines in Infor. You can see that two lines are highlighted green, meaning we successfully paired them to PO lines one and four. I’ll post this to Infor. Back in Infor, the record came over cleanly with no issues.
Now let’s look at a record with problems. This is a very similar invoice to what we just reviewed, but with a different PO number and a couple of issues. The first: the invoice vendor does not match the PO vendor. Scrolling down, we can also see that we were only able to pair the exam tables line — we were not able to pair the bed electric line. Looking at the PO itself, there’s only one line available, so there’s no line to pair to.
This is a key advantage of Yoga. In today’s world, when you have a PO vendor mismatch or a missing PO line, AP typically has to send an email or call the purchasing team to get it resolved. With Yoga, we can route this directly to the purchasing team from within the application. I’ll select Route to Purchasing Invoice Resolution and add a comment for the buyer: ‘I am missing the bed electric PO line — please advise on the correct path forward.’ AP clicks Confirm and goes back to working other invoices.
Over in the Purchasing Invoice Resolution queue, the record comes through to the assigned buyer — in this case, Keith — with the AP comment visible. Once a day, you can summarize all outstanding items for a buyer and send them an email: ‘Hey Keith, here are the invoices being held up — can you please resolve these for AP?’ Supply chain comes in and all the invoice fields are locked — they can’t edit any invoice data. They can only use the Document Notes to communicate back. Once they’ve resolved the issue — say, they added a new line in Infor — they write back to AP: ‘Added new line five in Infor.’ And then they route it back to AP Review.
The supply chain interaction within Yoga is intentionally small. The Purchasing Invoice Resolution queue is designed for PO vendor mismatches, missing lines, and closed POs. Receiving issues — missing receipts, quantity or pricing discrepancies — are all handled in Infor’s native buyer messaging system. We’re only addressing the things Infor doesn’t have native functionality for.
Finally, let’s look at the duplicate functionality — because it can be glossed over quickly but provides a lot of value when done right. In AP Duplicate Invoices, I’ll open the City of Fountain Cleaning record. Here we see two different duplicate indicators. The first is a possible duplicate check based on company, vendor, and invoice number — a three-way match. Right below that is a reason code of Perfect Duplicate, which means this is a five-way match: same company, vendor, invoice number, invoice date, and invoice amount. In those cases, we automatically check the Duplicate Reviewed box. AP doesn’t need to open this record — there’s almost no scenario where it requires their attention.
But let’s say a duplicate comes in for a different company, or — common with utility vendors — the same invoice number is reused cycle after cycle. In those cases, the invoice amounts or dates might differ. We’d flag it with a different duplicate reason and leave the Duplicate Reviewed box unchecked so AP knows to take a look. We can also generate invoice numbers for utilities using fields like the account number and service date, which makes review easier.
Early on with Yoga, your AP team will be focused on working through the backlog of invoices. But over time, as that volume becomes more manageable, the AP Duplicate Invoices queue is a great area to shift team members toward proactive work. Instead of chasing final notices or working statements, they can proactively monitor for duplicates — which reduces inbound vendor inquiries and continuously improves the overall AP process.
Let’s jump back to the slides for a quick look at the out-of-the-box reports available in Yoga.
The first is the AP Overview Report. This shows a breakdown of document ingestion by type — PO, non-PO, and other — and a Processing Differential Report comparing total invoices ingested versus total invoices processed. When the differential is green and large, that means we’re working down a backlog. A green differential with a small number means we’re roughly in equilibrium — some months we process slightly more than we ingest, some months slightly less. When this turns red and grows, that’s a signal that we’re falling behind on processing relative to what’s coming in. You can set the time window to 7 days, 30, 60, 90, or a full year.
Also in the overview is the User Productivity Report. This shows the number of Awaiting Payment routes each processor took — meaning how many invoices they successfully posted to Infor — versus their total route actions. In this example, Caitlin Traeger successfully processed 130 invoices to Infor and touched 176 invoices total. That 46-invoice gap may have gone to Cancel, to Vendor Maintenance because a new vendor needed to be set up, or to the Purchasing Invoice Resolution queue. We still credit the processor for those because they took the time to review and triage them. And at the top, you can see the Yoga system itself processed 217 invoices straight through with no human touch.
On average, most AP processors can handle between 80 and 150 invoices a day using Yoga, depending on your business processes.
We also have reporting for the purchasing side. The Purchase Invoice Resolution Report shows aging — how long invoices have been sitting in that queue. In this example, the average is 22.5 days across two invoices totaling $10,000. This is important because nothing in Yoga shows up on your accrual reports until it gets to Infor. If you have $7 million sitting in the Purchase Invoice Resolution queue because of PO issues, this report surfaces that liability and helps get AP and supply chain leadership aligned on resolving it.
The Efficiency Report within Purchase Invoice Resolution shows how many times each invoice went back and forth between AP and supply chain. In a perfect scenario, that’s once — AP identifies an issue, sends it to supply chain, supply chain resolves it, sends it back. When you see large numbers going back and forth two or three times, it may indicate AP is sending things over that supply chain doesn’t feel responsible for, or supply chain isn’t fully resolving issues before sending them back. This transparency helps both teams work together more effectively and improve the overall procure-to-pay process. Supply chain also gets the same User Productivity Report as AP.
Thank you all so much for taking time to see a quick look at the Yoga for FSM invoice solution. We covered a non-PO invoice, a PO invoice, the Purchasing Invoice Resolution workflow, duplicate detection, and the reporting suite. If you’d like to see more of the application — including service contracts or credits, which we didn’t get to today — or if you’d like to see what this looks like with your own data, please feel free to reach out to me directly at mauch@rpic.com. I hope you have a great rest of your Friday and a wonderful weekend. Thank you so much.
