Achieving 10x reduction in Invoice Processing Times

Eliminate Repetitive Manual Data Entry

Keying in data from invoices to finance systems is surprisingly still a very manual, error prone and tedious task carried out by businesses of all sizes today. Electronic invoicing partly solves the challenge for high transaction volume  trade partners, however, the integration costs and time to implement these solutions prohibit them from solving invoicing with the long tail of trading partners with lower transaction volumes.

Thankfully, through a combination of technologies including Robotic Process Automation, OCR and AI, affordable solutions are now within reach to address the majority of invoices processed manually.

Most businesses receive invoices digitally, usually in PDF format by email. Automatically picking up these invoices from a mailbox and extracting header and line item data from them can be achieved with a combination of OCR and narrowly applied Artificial Intelligence (using patterns rather then rules).

Manage by Exception

Once data is extracted from invoices, the process of matching Invoices with Purchase Orders and Goods Received Notes becomes much easier and can be automated. With the help of relatively simple low code applications, Accounts Payable teams can exclusively focus on the resolution of exceptions and let matched invoices be processed automatically with Robotic Process Automation.

Leverage Robotic Process Automation

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a great tool for accounts payable processing. By mimicking human interactions with your financial applications, a "Bot" can take data from invoices that have been successfully matched and post them with exactly the same approach as a human would navigating your application's user interface without any human intervention.

Perform Root Cause Analysis for Increased ROI

As we have just described, it is possible to receive PDF invoices from trading partners and have them automatically read, matched and then posted onto your ERP or Financial system without any human intervention whatsoever. With good reporting and analysis on all exceptions, the root cause of these can be identified and eliminated over time, thereby increasing the throughput of invoices being processed without intervention over time.

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With this approach, introducing significant automation to your accounts payable processes you can achieve up to 10x reduction in invoice processing time, dramatically shorten your invoice receipt to invoice posting times and reduce your GRNI (Goods Received not Invoiced) liability and reconciliation efforts.

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