Introduction to SmartResearch
SmartResearch is a question-and-answer workspace for your finance data. It lets you type questions in plain language and get answers based on the invoices, payments, vendors, and related information in your approved systems of record.
SmartResearch connects to systems such as Workday and other configured data sources. It uses predefined metrics, key performance indicators (KPIs), and configuration rules (“Smart Skills”) to interpret your questions and return results as short explanations, tables, and charts.
SmartResearch does not change your underlying data or replace your existing reports. It provides a faster way to explore and investigate questions that would otherwise require manual report building, spreadsheet work, or email requests to operations teams.
SmartResearch is designed to help you answer finance questions quickly and consistently, using the same definitions and metrics across your organization.
Examples include:
- Understand invoice status and risk
- “Which invoices are overdue and still waiting for approval?”
- “Show invoices over [amount] that are not yet paid.”
- Analyze spend and vendors
- “Show total invoice amount by vendor for the last 90 days.”
- “Which vendors have the highest invoice volume this quarter?”
- “Which vendors account for most of our spend this month?”
- Monitor process performance
- “How many invoices were processed last month?”
- “How long does it take on average for invoices to be approved?”
- “How many invoices had exceptions this month?”
In all these cases, you interact with SmartResearch in a similar way:
- You type a question in natural language.
- SmartResearch interprets the question using your configured metrics and Smart Skills.
- SmartResearch returns an answer with narrative text, tables, and/or charts.
- You can ask follow-up questions to refine or drill down on the result.
Because SmartResearch uses shared metric definitions, different users see answers based on the same underlying logic instead of building separate one-off spreadsheets or reports.