Vendor Inquiry Automation: Product Walkthrough

Founder Mason Auch walks through Auxtri's Vendor Inquiry Automation product: what inquiry automation is and why it's an important addition to your AP team, Auxtri's dashboards, the review queue where your team will review and send responses, and finally the reports to understand the inquiries and statements.

Your team stays in the loop the whole way. Auxtri does the lookup and the typing, which is the slow part, and your AP team keeps the judgment call. The lookups run against your ERP, so nothing moves out of your system of record.

Transcript#

What inquiry automation is#

Hello everyone. My name is Mason Auch and I am the CEO and founder of Auxtri.

Today we're going to be taking a look at one of Auxtri's product offerings, and that is the inquiry automation tool. Before we do that though, what is inquiry automation? Inquiry automation is something that has become more popular over the last year to year and a half now, and that's due to two different things. The first one is the big increase and rise of AI, specifically around LLMs. But there's also a very practical business case, and that is that suppliers are just consistently not adopting supplier portals.

So inquiry automation is the practice of sitting on a monitored mailbox, receiving those inquiries from those vendors, automatically classifying them, extracting the right data, looking up that data in your ERP, and then prepopulating a response that can either be reviewed by your AP team or set up for an automatic email back to the vendors. So now that we understand what that tool is supposed to be, let's take a look here at Auxtri's.

The dashboard#

So when you first sign in, you'll land here on your dashboard. Now this dashboard is specifically configured for our inquiry setup. So here we can see we have information around how many are pending our review, how many we've processed today, our average response times.

We can also see our ingestion trend broken down by day. So here's our day one over here, where we can see how many we're ingesting versus processing each day, and we can also see it by our vendors as well. Here we can see a nice breakdown of our review queue, and we can also see any of those items that we have not responded to in over 48 hours as well. So kind of a quick action area for us here.

The review queue#

But let's jump over and take a look here at our review queue, as this is where we will spend the majority of our time working the application. We have both an Outlook view and a table view. So table view is kind of for our power users, where we are able to search off of each of our columns, and we're also able to add and remove columns as well. Over here we also have our quick actions. So let's say I want to see everything that's missing domains. I can come here and click that as well.

I personally like working out of our Outlook view a little bit more. So here we can see we have kind of that traditional Outlook view, and when I open up a record, we're going to see that we have our original message here. We have our prepopulated response down below. And then we kind of have our ERP sidebar over here. So if we look at this initial message, we can see we have a vendor asking us for the status of these three different invoices. Now, without Auxtri, what our team would have to do is copy each of these invoice numbers and go to another tab or monitor and look up the statuses of each of these, and then type up a response to our team.

But with Auxtri, we can see that this domain, so at auxtri.com, is tied to three different vendors. So we have Auxtri Medical Supply, Auxtri, and Auxtri Softwares. Now, in most cases, we're going to have a one to one match where we'll tie a domain to a vendor. But in those cases of the Cardinals, the Meditechs, the Teleflexes that keep acquiring more and more domains, or for any reason that we might have to have multiple vendors in our system, we wanted that ability to be able to join one to many.

So here we can see that we have 100% confidence that this is an invoice status. So what we did was we took those three invoices, we went and searched across those three different vendors, and we were able to find this information here, and it's automatically populated a response for us. If we want to look up any additional information for those, we can come over here to our invoice lookup. And we can see we have just kind of some quick information here for us to be able to do a quick spot check. And then if we want to be able to open up, we can view the ERP record and view the invoice image that this is associated to as well. So that kind of gives us a nice ability to look quickly at this and then also be able to dig in deeper if there's anything that concerns us.

You can also see here that we have configured our email signature. So my email signature is here, and it's going to automatically append that. Just kind of a nice to have that makes the application look a little bit cleaner when we're replying to those vendors. At this point, I've kind of done my due diligence. I've seen, yep, hey, that's paid. It's for vendor. Yep, that's paid. Yep, this one's still open. If there's anything else I want to add here, I can. This is our default template, so we can also configure this as a part of our implementation to make it look and sound exactly how your healthcare organization wants it as well. From here I'm going to go ahead and click send reply, and we'll go ahead and send that off.

Exporting the queue#

We can also from our review queue export that to Excel if we want. So I'll hit export to Excel and we can see that that downloaded immediately. If we have more than 1,000 records, it actually goes into what we call our queue system. And our queue system can be viewed here underneath our user profiles on the my export section.

Reports#

For today's overview, I want to talk about two specific reports. Our first one is our user productivity report. So this report has a nice breakdown of all of the actions our users take. So here we can see how many they viewed, how many they sent, how many they archived over the last 30 days. All of our reports have the ability to change this date. We can also export the underlying data to Excel. The same 1,000 rule applies. And what's really nice is we can also see this how is this calculated, which gives us nice information about this report and how each of these columns is calculated.

The other report that's really powerful is our vendor activity. So this is going to show us the top vendors by our vendor account for the last 30 days. So here we can see Cardinal Health sent us 34 emails and their top was their invoice statuses. We also have the drill down ability. So here I can click that open and I'm able to see not just the invoice statuses, but I'm able to see the payment date, payment proof and general inquiries as well.

Wrapping up#

I thank you guys so much for taking the time to see this quick product overview of our inquiry automation product. If you have any additional desires or questions, please feel free to reach out to us, or you can watch the rest of these videos on our YouTube channel as well. Thank you so much and have a great rest of your day.

Keep reading#

If you would like to learn more about Vendor Inquiry Automation, take a read. If you would like to see how the tool works with your ERP, see its specific integration pages. Finally if you would like to see a more in-depth demo, please schedule a call with us via our demo page!