From unaccounted funds to mismanaged finances, it's easy for businesses to lose track of their expenditure without a proper procurement process in place. With so many purchasing and supplier costs to juggle, poor financial mis-management could see losses run into the thousands if not millions.

Ukrainian entrepreneur Andrew Zhyvolovych founded procurement startup Precoro a decade ago to help businesses better control their spending.

“Our main goal when launching Precoro was to help small and mid-size businesses access the kind of advanced AI tools that were only available for large enterprises related to procurement,” said the founder & CEO.

Simplifying invoicing to reduce business losses

Typically, finance teams are handling hundreds of invoices at a time which can become unwieldy to manage, leading to a higher likelihood of human error.

“Sometimes teams are dealing with hundreds if not thousands of invoices and it becomes really overwhelming, almost impossible for humans to keep up. Naturally, mistakes happen and mistakes in this case could be really costly. Unfortunately, this lack of proper invoice control often goes unnoticed until it is too late,” warns Zhyvolovych.

Concerns could arise around wrongful expense claims or unnecessary purchases. Without a centralized system to keep track of all expenses, it’s easy to lose track of funds and difficult to pinpoint where money is being wasted.

“This poor invoice control prevents teams from planning effectively, meaning it's not just an operational problem - it could even be a threat to business growth,” Zhyvolovych cautions.

Fortunately, Precoro built an AI tool capable of processing massive amounts of invoices and automating repetitive error prone workflows. Instead of just reading text like a traditional OCR, the Google Custom Extractor actually "sees" the layout of the document. The AI-powered OCR recognizes where important details are located — even in complex formats. This means it can accurately extract key information like vendor names, dates, items, and invoice amounts. Additionally, the more data the model processes, the better it gets at recognizing the unique patterns in invoices - ensuring faster processing and quicker payments to suppliers.

Precoro has already achieved outstanding results leveraging Google’s Custom Extractor with generative AI to accurately digitise and extract fields on invoices without discrepancies. The level of precision has even led to Precoro’s clients claiming the OCR extraction is “suspiciously perfect,” Zhyvolovych smiles.

As a result of the innovation, Precoro has transformed “the most time-consuming and manual part of procurement operations,” significantly reducing time and error rates. “By leveraging Google's AI-powered OCR, the invoice processing time has been drastically reduced from two days to an average of 2 minutes, with some instances taking only seconds, and have experienced 95% accuracy with minimal training in auto-filling invoice fields,” shares Zhyvolovych.

Collaborating with Google to become AI pioneers

Precoro is hoping a strategic partnership with Google as a recipient of the Ukraine Support Fund, will help them deliver on exciting new offerings including expenses and invoice management.

“This exciting partnership is more than just technological, it is a commitment to staying ahead of the curve and leading innovation especially in procurement. As a partner, Google brings the biggest value to help us enhance the user experience by providing customers with cutting-edge OCR technology, faster logins and better reporting capabilities,” Zhyvolovych says.

By participating in the initiative, Precoro enjoyed access to plenty of resources, mentorship and opportunities that helped the business remain competitive. The entire team completed Google AI training courses which helped them develop their expertise and align their strategies with developments in artificial intelligence fields.

“We’re so grateful for the access we had to Google's expertise during the program which really helped us to refine our approach, connect with like minded people, and navigate challenges more effectively. It also provides invaluable networking opportunities for our sales and marketing teams whilst helping to reinforce our position as a pioneer in AI,” said Zhyvolovych.

The need for Precoro’s tech is clear, as they’ve seen over 50% revenue growth year-over-year, $40 billion of purchase orders processed in 2024, over 1,000 customers and operations in 80 countries globally.

Predictions on how AI will accelerate business growth

Looking to the future, Zhyvolovych says invoices are just the beginning and he’s excited for Precoro to dive into the massively growing expense management market too.

“We're planning on extending our AI solution to help businesses better manage expenses, for example scanning receipts, reviewing contracts and identifying discrepancies. All that data can then be imported into the system which automatically categorizes the expense and files it seamlessly within seconds,” he says.

Precoro has ambitious goals for their AI offering and how it can power accurate data insights and analytics.

“With AI we can suggest the best suppliers for particular categories, identify spending patterns, and predict future needs based on previous behaviors. Our goal is to extract the most critical information to support better decision making and ultimately enhance the user experience,” says Zhyvolovych.

Much like the rest of the procurement industry, Precoro predicts AI will continue to transform the sector and Zhyvolovych suspects generative AI tools like Gemini and Chat GPT will play a huge role in that shift.

“We expect to see more clients submitting prompts to create everything from purchase orders to invoices, removing the need for manual document creation. Since procurement is more of an operational function, we believe AI could really be a fantastic driver for efficiency, growth and business value.”