How Accounts Payable Automation Can Deliver Strategic Business Advantage

Invoice processing is critical, yet one of the most laborious business activities for any organization. Before discussing accounts payable automation, let’s see how your accounts payable team manually handles hundreds or thousands of invoices every month ensuring that:

• Every invoice received through physical mail, e-mail, fax or through any other source are accounted with the date and time stamp of receipt.
• Every invoice data is entered in the company’s accounting or financial software.
• Every invoice is matched to its purchase order.
• Every invoice is allocated to its respective cost center.
• Every invoice is sent to the central accounts payable department if the company has various branches or divisions.
• Every invoice goes through an approval workflow.
• Every invoice is tracked for its timely payment.

And, then there is also the other side of invoice processing that is even more time consuming – the query handling! Every time, your accounts payable team receives an incorrect invoice, duplicate, part of the order value, delayed for receipt/approval, misplaced or lost, they have to follow-up with the vendors and concerned persons/departments in the company to resolve the issue. This further cause delay in timely payments and hampers the workflow of other business processes that are allied with invoice processing.

This complete cycle of manual invoice processing takes a few days to a few weeks, depending on the volume of your business. The larger the size of the business, the more tedious this process can get. Even if you are a small business, you are likely to scale in the future and can expect an increase in the number of invoices. Forrester states that inefficient manual processing can cost your business, $20 or more per invoice.

While your accounts payable team may be handling the process as capably as they can, how confidently can you say that they are efficient and the process is error-free?  We think you and we know the answer.

Intelligent Automation has been improving some of the most complex business processes, but its potential still remains under-tapped in invoice processing.

Accounts Payable automation refers to the use of technology to streamline the entire workflow from the starting point to the endpoint of the invoice process. It requires deploying bots or E-Workers which are built with intelligent automation skills. These E-Workers collaborate as a unified workforce with human employees and integrate seamlessly in business workflows.

Now you may ask why does my business require invoice processing automation. Well, the business advantages mentioned below should be enough to consider adopting automation:

• Eliminates manual error rate and improves the accuracy of the process.
• Saves processing time on repetitive tasks such as sorting/classification, verification and data entry.
• Prevents loss, misplacement or misfiling of invoices.
• Speed up multi-tier invoice approval workflow and time.
• Get real-time control and visibility over invoice operations to make informed and agile business decisions.
• Enhance vendor relationships and customer service quality.
• Ensures process continuity even if the employee handling the process is on leave.
• Helps you to go paperless – you can save on physical storage space and keep data safely on the cloud to access anywhere, anytime.
• Expedites query handling time and even reduce the number of queries.
• Meets audit and compliance standards.
• Help you become an eco-friendly organization by reducing carbon footprint through automation.

As you can understand, automated invoice processing can address all pain points of the process and result in operational efficiency and overall cost reduction.

Now that we have established the importance of invoice processing automation, let’s take a look at how supervity.ai Supplier Sam can help automate your accounts payable function:

1. Convert Non-PDF Files into PDF Format

The vendors send their invoices in various electronic files such as XLS, DOCX, GIF and TIF. Converting them into PDF format for easy processing can take several man-hours. Bots can download these e-files and automatically convert them into PDF format for further processing.

2. Categorize Invoices in Native and Non-Native PDF Files

Bots sort out PDF files into four buckets and put them into respective e-folders for easy search.

• Native PDF with PO number
• Native PDF without PO number
• Non-Native PDF with PO
• Non-Native PDF without PO

3. Use OCR to Read Non-Native PDF Files

Some vendors send paper formats of invoices, either printed, handwritten or scanned copies. When these paper formats are converted into PDF files, it becomes difficult to convert them into editable text. Bots use their in-built intelligent Optical Character Recognition (OCR) capability to make non-native PDF files editable and easily extract text information from it.

4. Capture Invoice Data

Bots can identify all the key data fields such as invoice number, invoice date, vendor name, vendor logo, number and type of items, barcodes, amount and taxes from all types of invoices. Bots can scan, interpret, import and pre-populate this information directly into your financial software. This takes away a massive load of routine data entry from your accounts payable team.

5. Manage Your Emails

Your accounts payable team gets overwhelmed with a load of mails, most of them being related to invoices. Managing these mails is itself a major time-consuming affair. Bots can manage your emails in various ways:

• Flag emails that contain invoices, sort them based on the file type and process them for data extraction.
• Delete junk or irrelevant emails.
• Send reminders when the invoice is due or overdue to receive from the vendors.
• Give duplicate invoice mail alerts.
• Route the emails directly to the concerned person or department.

6. Verify Invoice Data with Master Data

The accounts payable team spend hours cross-checking invoice data with their internal master database, matching original purchase order with the invoices or tracking duplicity. Bots can do this task in much lesser time.

7. Facilitate Electronic Approvals

Many times, invoice approvals get stuck in the hierarchy, causing a delay in the payments. Bots can electronically route the invoices to the right authority or department for review, approval or query resolution. It also sends reminders to push the approvals, enabling faster processing time.

8. Maintain Records and Send Reports

Bots capture every piece of information and keep track of every action of the invoice processing at various stages of the workflow. It sends out real-time reports to the concerned users to help them plug the loopholes and take a quick action to resolve issues if any. These records can be also referred for internal process review or audit and compliance purpose.

Accounts Payable automation can give you fast and measurable business outcomes. It can help you gain a competitive edge in today’s volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous market.

Interested in learning more on how we can work together with your organization to automate your accounts payable and supplier management functions. Sign up for a demo here.