How To Build an Automated Invoice Processing Workflow

How To Build an Automated Invoice Processing Workflow

(Last Updated On: May 19, 2022)

Using an Automated Invoice processing software to make invoicing faster, more accurate, and fully compliant can significantly improve overall organisation efficiency and productivity, not to mention the huge economic benefits realised through time and cost savings.

Aside from those advantages, a cloud based automated process guarantees that invoices are maintained even during moments of disruption or when AP personnel are required to operate remotely. Invoice management system not only saves time and reduces human error, but it also frees up people and resources to be employed for other profitable and strategic purposes.

Procurement and Accounts Payable (A/P) are perfectly aligned with broader business results and metrics using Invoice management. By reducing unnecessary data, speeding up the invoice-to-payment cycle, and resolving matching problems and exceptions, an automated invoice processing system can help you increase productivity.

Many firms fail to achieve process efficiency in invoicing, thereby impacting cash flow and the bottom line becomes a massive problem. In an ideal and broader accounts payable automation plan, automated invoice processing can reduce the cost per invoice and also the time taken to process it as part of a thorough invoicing process.

These benefits offer a strong case for any company trying to reduce the (sometimes massive) data entry process.

Benefits of automated invoice processing workflow

  • Improve supplier collaboration to speed up on boarding, document extraction, reconciliations, and error detection and correction
  • Accelerate invoice processing, validation, and approval to increase efficiency while lowering operating costs
  • Reduce or eliminate the use of paper and manual errors
  • Streamline and improve invoice, purchase order, and reconciliation
  • Improved identification of matching data – how supplier invoices were matched with purchase orders that your organization has already issued

Leverage AI and NLP for not only data extraction, but also data interpretation, data processing and automated Invoice Processing Workflows

When it comes to extracting data from invoices, purchase orders, receipts, and other documents, KlearStack AI helps you build an automated invoice processing workflow with a completely template-less approach. This entails doing away with the entire process of creating and maintaining templates/rules.

KlearStack takes your free-form invoices and converts them into structured data. The software also provides you with a 360-degree view via dashboard.

Once you sign in to your KlearStack account, you will be able to see all of your invoices and their details.  You can upload invoices and other documents to KlearStack through Email, API and through a web browser UI. Even scanned images of invoices can be uploaded to KlearStack. You can either upload a single file or a batch of files to begin extracting information from them.

KlearStack scans, contextually interprets the data, automatically extracts information and sorts it into designated fields using Intelligent OCR technology driven by AI, ML and NLP.

Invoice processing is made up of a number of smaller processes, some of which will require  human contact, such as approving expenses or checking for accuracy (only in case of invoices with exceptions, flagged by KlearStack rules engine). While others are ripe for straight through processing like data collection and approval workflows.

Having said that, let’s break down some of the AP processes that are great for automation and provide some details on how and why. The invoice processing flowchart can also help you  identify and eliminate inefficiencies.

●       Receiving Bills

If you have not implemented AP automation for invoice processing, chances are you will receive invoices  from anywhere, from different departments and mediums: postal mail, faxes, image attachments by e-mail and electronically.

We might not need to tell you how much time your employees spend collecting, organizing, and scanning invoices and how tedious the process is, we’d say instead this:

If you are able to receive  invoices electronically, you can email all of your supplier invoices  to your AP automation system to save time on  receipt.

And guess what? In fact, there are many benefits to your suppliers when sending their invoices electronically.

●       Data entry and retrieval

It tells you how to automate data entry in excel, if you receive an electronic invoice, great! AP automation software is particularly well suited to help collect and extract this data without human intervention. That’s right; Your employees no longer have to enter data manually.

Entering data manually is not only tedious for your team, but it is also time consuming and prone to typos and human errors. Software, on the other hand, is designed to read and understand invoice data accurately and almost immediately after learning your processes.

You can also capture and extract invoice data under headers, including individual or custom line items. And if for some reason your supplier hasn’t sent an electronic invoice, you can still scan your documents. Take a picture using your tablet/ mobile phone and email the same to KlearStack. KlearStack will then extract the data via OCR and AI technology with incredible accuracy.

Enjoy benefits of economies of Scale, by digitizing and automating end-to-end Invoice processing Workflows

According to a study, companies are only hesitantly using new technologies like AI. Yet, AI is the key to exploiting the advantages of digitization and economies of scale. Especially because AI enables automation, the further processing of documents without manual effort for data extraction and interpretation.

The digitization of invoice management offers many benefits. Documents from various sources, like emails, online portals, and invoicing tools, can automatically be compiled and processed in the cloud so that authorized users can access them from anywhere in the world.

Moreover, relevant invoice information like invoice number, supplier, and invoice amount are often read without manual effort, and as an example, be matched with data from bank statements automatically and real-time. Additionally, the specified information can automatically be transferred to other applications, like accounting software or to the tax advisor.

To see how KlearStack AI can completely automate your invoice processing workflows, speak to a KlearStack consultant today!

Ashutosh Saitwal
Ashutosh Saitwal
www.klearstack.com/

Ashutosh is the founder and director of the award winning KlearStack AI platform. You can catch him speaking at NASSCOM events around the world where he speaks and is an evangelist for RPA, AI, Machine Learning and Intelligent Document Processing.