Skyscend
Revolutionizing Invoice Management

Invoice management is an integral facet of procurement and a predominant method of keeping records of sale. However, manually generating invoices is a convoluted, time consuming, and error-prone process which can be detrimental to an organization’s bottom line. Organizations that use a paper based invoicing system need to go through a chain of process to get the work done. This means having to manually input the invoices into the ERP system, extracting the information, and matching the details, which decreases productivity to a large extent. Although there are many invoice management solutions available in the market today, only a few ensure seamless management of the invoicing process or allow invoices of any form to be effortlessly imported into the system. Addressing this need is Skyscend, a procurement services firm that offers a painless way to accelerate an organization’s invoice-workflow. The company introduces a secure SaaS platform – SkyscendPay that automates a business’ resource intensive invoicing process by integrating with existing ERP systems.

“Our vision is to make procurement easy, painless, and transparent”

In an interview with CIO Applications Magazine, Chayapathy Gangadarappa, founder and CEO of Skyscend and HeeraGaria, CTO, shed light on the company’s capabilities in invoice automation, supply chain, procurement, ERP integration, Blockchain, and more. Prior to founding Skyscend, Gangadarappa worked as the lead technical architect of Ariba implementations, Skyscend’s parent company. With his technical prowess and extensive experience in procurement, Gangadarappa strives to bring success to organizations by providing an exceptional customer experience. Garia is a strategic technology leader with an entrepreneurial mindset and proven track record of leading effective and innovative business and technology strategy.

What were the factors that led to the conception of Skyscend?

The journey of Skyscend in the procurement space started in the early 2016 when its parent company, Ariba services, began operating as a consulting firm. In its early days of inception, Ariba was strictly focusing on providing procurement consulting services for their clients in the government sector. Through our services, we wanted to make procurement easy, painless, and transparent. For that reason, we thought of expanding the consulting services into the commercial space. However, the pandemic disrupted our business plans, heavily impacting the service and consulting vertical of our business. It was at that point, that weset foot into product development and launched SkyscendPay, an invoice management solution. With it, we run three business verticals; the consulting practice in the government sector, procurement consulting service in the commercial sector, and an invoice management product.

With SkyscendPay, we help our clients accelerate their invoice workflow by relegating inefficient manual invoicing processes. In a very short period after the launch, we have implemented the product for a client, and we are working toward getting the product up and running within their ecosystem.

What are some of the business challenges you solve with SkyscendPay?

SkyscendPay serves different purposes for organizations, depending on the company size. When it comes to invoicing, most small and medium size companies still rely on excel sheets and emails to get the job done. We provide an easy and painless way to automate their invoicing process by deploying the entire SkyscendPay suite.

For small and medium size businesses, we encourage them to get the complete suite. On the other hand, bigger companies have already onboarded an ERP system to perform various procurement related functions. For such organizations, we solve the challenge of multiple ERP systems by bridging the gaps associated with ERP integration and migration. For instance, we recently had a discussion with a client working on a homegrown procurement system. Due to a recent merger and acquisition, the client had to use yet another ERP system. Using multiple ERP systems was a huge roadblock for the company, making it difficult for them to perform their day-to-day tasks, including invoice management. We were able to solve their difficulties in ERP migration through our SkyscendPay solution.

What are some of the features and functionalities of SkyscendPay?

SkyscendPay is a cloud-based SaaS platform developed for businesses of any size. We deliver SkyscendPay as a subscription-based tier pricing model. It provides a lot of flexibility to our clients in terms of the features and functionalities they require. Instead of relying on slow, inefficient, and manual data entry, Skyscend Pay employs bespoke AI capabilities to intelligently import invoices. With that, even completely novel invoice formats can be understood. To make the invoicing process error-free, Skyscend pay makes use of novel method that obviates error. We support advanced shipment notification and three-way matching. More importantly, we perform account reconciliation effectively, which is one of the major challenges for finance professionals. To do that, we bring bespoke technologies, including block chain, OCR (Optical Character Recognition), and AI. We also enable our clients to provide discounted pricing by customizing the workflows.

What are some of the key differentiating factors of SkyscendPay?

One of the key differentiating factors is the use of emerging technologies. We are using emerging technologies such as AI, OCR, blockchain and our mobile-first approach to solve business procurement needs. SkyscendPay’s intuitive web application can also be accessed through a mobile app. With our backend capabilities, developed on RestfulAPIs, can integrate with multiple ERP systems. This feature allows SkyscendPay to sit on top of the existing ERP systems. Moreover, unlike our competitors who are starting to move toward the cloud ecosystem, we have built our product as a cloud native platform. Although we give the flexibility to deploy our product on-premise, we highly encourage our clients to utilize the computing power of cloud ecosystem.

What does the future hold for Skyscend and SkyscendPay?

Although we are focusing on invoice management, our immediate goal is to take our platform to the next level by augmenting new functionalities to serve enterprise customers with a global presence. We are introducing a new functionality, global electronic invoicing that enables our clients to adhere with the legal system of the country they operate. With our solution, our clients can validate their invoices through the corresponding legal system existing in a country. We are also working on yet another feature, smart contract and supply-chain financing. We believe supply chain financing will be a huge help to small businesses.

Skyscend is a company that heavily focuses on the voice of its customers. As we have extensive experience in procurement consulting space, we understand our client’s challenges better than anyone in the industry. For that reason, while developing the SkyscendPay platform, we have considered all barriers to invoice management. We collect customer’s feedback and use them to improve our product. As a company working in the procurement space, we strive to modernize the inefficient processes that carves into an organization’s bottom line.