CloudTrade – A Digital Transformation in the Invoicing World

Peter Smith from Spend Matters discusses the latest on Calculus investment, CloudTrade, with Non-Executive Chairman, Philip Padfield

Last week I caught up with Philip Padfield, a non-executive Chairman with CloudTrade. He also introduced me to their new marketing head, Tara Burghardt.

CloudTrade has been going since 2010 but seems to be slipping into a higher gear, raising £2.2M this year and bringing in Padfield (who knows his way around the software start-up / next stage world) to strengthen the senior team of three founder directors. We talked about the CloudTrade business, which lies in the absolutely fascinating area of electronic invoicing, and more specifically, having very clever software that enables pdf invoices to be handled easily and accurately, with full capture of data and conversion into e-invoices.

Some procurement execs will be motivated by “doing the right thing”. They can see that payment (invoicing) is the end of a holistic process, and really it should all be joined up. Making that more efficient – and addressing that long tail of small suppliers (which the CloudTrade product does) should be part of that overall process improvement.

Burghardt: we have patents on our core tech – essentially “robots” that read human readable documents – the solution can do things that the big purchase-to-pay suites and platforms can’t.

It might only be addressing part of the process, but this sounds like “digital transformation” to me.  If the CPO can tell the CFO or SEO that they’re using leading-edge digital technology to revolutionise handling of invoices … there’s some brownie points in that approach perhaps?

And finally, if you can link it to supply chain finance, then that is a pretty hot topic – because it has given CPOs a way of actually generating revenue and profit from the invoicing process.  Can you do that?

Yes, we can, said Burghardt. We partner with other software firms, where our product adds to their functionality, and several of those offer SCF options. So, we’re an enabler for that.

I was told that the firm’s main target market is “the massive middle” – possibly those mid-sized firms who may not have automated AP and invoicing too much as yet. All this is through the firm’s partner network – that includes Advanced, SAP and IBM who are deploying the Cloudtrade solution to larger end-user organisations.

So, there you go. We obviously haven’t seen the product in action, and try as I may, I can’t make invoicing the most exciting thing in the world. But if you haven’t gone far down the road of automating and sorting out what can be an expensive and difficult process, you might want to take a look at CloudTrade.