Tilitoimisto Likvidi is an accounting office that has built its success and growth by building a strong expertise in digitalization. This expertise is evident in how they help their customers navigate challenges related to digitalization as well as their extensive usage of digital tools in improving their internal processes. Likvidi was faced with the challenge of automating over 10000 monthly purchase invoices that were being processed in over 300 different customer environments. Accode was the first tool that Likvidi felt had the potential to properly solve this challenge as it enabled centralization of all automation efforts while allowing for very flexible solutions.

Building the foundation for data driven decisions

Likvidi, like most accounting offices, is faced with the challenge of highly scattered automation and process development efforts. Automation and process is determined by every individual bookkeeper and might vary between customers. In this scenario, management has no tools to understand how automatic they are across customers and processes, making it near impossible to systematically improve in this.

Using Accode, Likvidi has managed to centralize the vast majority of their purchase invoice processing into a single easily understandable workflow. Likvidi can now collect data on how every single purchase invoice was processed from start to finish. This allows them to build extremely useful metrics such as the percentage of invoices that required changes from a bookkeeper, also known as “no-touch” invoices.

We have gone from having no data on the state of our automation whatsoever to knowing exactly what tasks are conducted manually and when for every single invoice

Tuomo Kolehmainen, CEO of Likvidi

Data driven process development

Within the first two months, the vast majority of Likvidi’s invoice processing had been moved into a centralized Accode workflow. There were two initial core observations:

8.2% of invoices are added manually instead of being received as e-invoices

8.5% of invoices were identified to be exceptions that require manual control (such as first invoices from a supplier, credit invoices, reminder invoices)

Processing the remaining invoices with machine learning alone resulted in a no-touch automation rate of 46%. By improving their training, instructions, processes, and automation configuration Likvidi has improved this automation rate from 46% to 66% over the course of four months, and the rate of improvement is yet to slow down as Likvidi grows more proficient with Accode while simultaneously understanding their data and processes better.

The ability to see every manually made change allows me to efficiently improve our automation configuration or internal processes, whichever is more suitable

Markus Virtanen, Head of Automation at Likvidi

Extending value to the customer

As Likvidi has grown as Accode users, they have been able to identify cases where they can provide significant value to their customers. One of their bigger clients within the construction industry tracks costs across various dimensions which results in a substantial amount of manual work for both Likvidi and the customer.

By helping the client standardize how this information should be included in invoices, Likvidi has been able to fully automate this process. Whenever this information is missing from an invoice it is automatically routed to the CFO of the client so that this person can take appropriate action within the company. This frees the bookkeeper completely from the unpleasant and tedious process of constantly reminding customers to follow agreed upon standards.

Building automation competence internally has allowed Likvidi to help their customers automate labor heavy processes on the customer side as well. This strengthens the position of Likvidi as a leading accounting office when it comes to digitalization.

Update (17.4.2023): Tilitoimisto Likvidi was recently acquired by Accountor, in part due to their expertise in automation and process development. Read more here