CloudTrade, an Advanced company, the leading provider of e-invoicing and complex data capture services, is celebrating a significant milestone in its partnership with SAP Ariba. CloudTrade announces that £2.5bn worth of invoices have been processed via its platform since 2018, when the CloudTrade and SAP Ariba Standard PDF Invoice conversion application was released. 

CloudTrade was acquired by Advanced, the leading provider of business software and services, in October 2021 and continues to drive investment and grow its relationship with SAP Ariba. Advanced’s expanding portfolio of solutions across Finance and Spend Management positions it well to support its customers and partners like SAP Ariba, to overcome more and more of the business challenges they face.

Nathan Ollier, Vice President of ERP for Advanced, explains: “SAP Ariba offers the World’s supply chain the opportunity to trade fully electronically, helping businesses of all sizes to achieve digital transformation and optimal scalability. The size of Ariba Network is unparalleled and, thanks to CloudTrade’s suite of unique, proprietary e-invoicing solutions, the methods by which the buyers and suppliers can transact are massively enhanced, so much so that £2.5bn worth of invoices have now been processed via CloudTrade’s platform, since the solution was launched on Ariba Network in 2018.”

Today CloudTrade offers a suite of solutions, available via the SAP® App Centre independently or as a solution suite. Those tools provide Ariba users with a single, affordable solution for the automation of all their inbound invoices, including PDF’s and images, low and high volume. CloudTrade’s solutions include:

• CloudTrade’s PDF Invoicing for Ariba Network, which extends the reach of electronic invoicing and enables medium volume senders and upwards (suppliers that submit over 100+ invoices per annum) to transact digitally on Ariba Network. Removing the need for suppliers to do PO Flip or undertake lengthy technical setups or use error prone OCR.

• PDF Invoicing Customizations PDF Invoicing Customizations reads, converts, and enriches machine generated PDF data to a format required by both Ariba Network and the buyer’s finance application. This can include additional fields or validation needed by the buyer to allow them to upload the document and data to their downstream processes.

• CloudTrade’s Two-way PO match and invoice enrichment service allows a buyer’s PO data to be accessed via the SAP Ariba published Open PO API, so the suppliers invoice can be checked and verified against a PO and mandatory fields before creating an SAP Ariba compliant cXML file for automated downstream processing.

• CloudTrade’s Buyer ANID Email Insertion delivers a customized, unmonitored service to automatically populate the subject line of the email with the sender’s ANID number to speed up identification checks, without any system changes from either the sender or buyer.

• CloudTrade Invoice conversion Services (CICS) for OpenICS add-on enables SAP Ariba users to process image files, alongside data PDF’s and Word, XLS and XML format invoices using CloudTrade’s patented technology, without making any operational or technical changes. CICS also ensures any specific extraction requirements and validation rules are met before the invoice is uploaded to Ariba network.

New add-ons are also set to be launched later this year to further enhance CloudTrade’s existing PDF universal data capture and conversion solutions for senders and receivers of any application generated documents.

Ollier continues: “CloudTrade’s unique, patented technology enables Ariba users to move past their reliance on paper or labor-intensive manual processing, to transact digitally with their trading partners, irrespective of their size or technical maturity. CloudTrade is the only solution available to Ariba Network that can be tailored to a business’s specific requirements and can fully automate the processing of invoices on the network, while maintaining optimum levels of data quality.”

CloudTrade’s rapid invoice automation enables submission and receipt of invoices from supplier to buyer with ease. A supplier simply emails or uploads the invoice (as produced from their billing system as standard) and it is converted to an Ariba Network compliant invoice for automated processing.

Nathan Ollier concludes: “We are immensely proud of our ongoing partnership with SAP Ariba, who CloudTrade have been working with since 2018, and the assistance the team have brought to Ariba Network during that time. CloudTrade has built an integrated, cloud-based service which offers an additional channel for users to automate their P2P processes, relieving many of the labor-intensive processes involved in running a modern business, including the error-prone re-keying of invoices, without sacrificing data completeness or accuracy. The team and I look forward to enabling more of the network to transact digitally and reap the rewards of automating their back-office functions.”

Over 850+ customers globally around the world trust CloudTrade with $20bn worth of documents as their application generated document automation tool, alongside over 50 partners. Founded in 2010 to offer a fresh approach to electronic document processing. CloudTrade forms an integral part of several global business service provider’s solutions.