Xero’s latest release promises machine learning, saving time and decreased errors with invoice coding. Fantastic!

Quoting from the Xero blog at https://www.xero.com/blog/2017/03/teaching-robot-accounting/

‘This model learns your invoice coding behaviors. It notes any mistakes recognized by accountants or bookkeepers, and includes corrections. Suggestions and predictions derive from what the model has learned. This approach was 15-20% more accurate than the best ‘rule of thumb’ models we came up with. It reaches 80% accuracy after learning from only four invoices.’

The question is, do you still need the receipt-bank integration with xero if xero is ensuring your invoice coding is correct.

I’d say a big yes, as receipt-bank;

  1. Extracts the key financial data from your invoice and thus reduces the risk of error. Xero’s upgrade still requires manual input of the invoice amount.
  2. Saves significant time as no data entry is required. Simply publish from receipt-bank to Xero and the invoice appears, coded and correct in xero.
  3. Stores the receipt on the cloud, ensuring ATO compliance for record-keeping and no paper copies are required.
  4. Automatically uses the correct account to use for certain suppliers with rules set up by you, so you don’t need to worry about Xero’s machine learning correction

Receipt-bank and xero together create a truly automated system

The Xero update is yet to be fully released, so we can review further then. In the meantime, an automated accounting system needs to eliminate data entry. The Receipt-bank and xero integration does this. The Xero machine learning upgrade is a plus, but receipt-bank and xero together create a truly automated system.