We are inevitably rushing towards a digitized world. Technology is trying to run every aspect of our lives along virtual wheels. But, when we backtrack our progress, there’s still something left behind. We are yet to embrace digitization in our office premises. A paperless office is still a thing of the future for many of us. Contracts, emails, project files, documents, and most importantly, invoices rest on the office tables, occupying unnecessary space and staff time to handle those papers. The accounts payable department, being an integral part of any organization, operates manually even now in most of the companies.
Every year, the U.S. spends $25-35 billion on filing, storing, and retrieving paper. The companies would have invested this amount in a bunch of productive business operations rather than spending on papers that anyways lie down in storage cabinets perhaps never to be opened again.
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Why Do We Need Paperless Automation in Office Premises?
The need for a paperless office is far from the matter of discussion in many organizations. They are perhaps not aware what paperless automation can do for their business, and hence, don’t pay heed to the supporting initiatives.
Therefore, we have compiled some primary reasons why paperless automation is the need of the hour.
1. To offload the cost burden
Manual document processing and management is person-dependent. That said, apart from all the paper-based expenses, you have to look after labor costs, too. The accounts payable department is one of the most common examples of an organization that deals with millions of invoices every month and doesn’t have any paperless workflows to automate the AP processes.
Going paperless, however, can save you from spending a fortune on papers and labor costs.
2. To reduce unnecessary time consumption
When the AP department deals with invoices, a bunch of processes are involved from receiving an invoice to processing it and finally paying the amount to the vendor. The team needs to convert invoice to excel by manually entering the details from the respective invoice fields. Then, it calculates the total amount and approves for payment. Imagine the time spent in carrying out these tasks every time an invoice comes up.
You can eliminate the paper-dependent workflows by introducing invoice automation and replacing manual entries with AI-based intelligent document interpretation.
3. To combat security risks
The IBM and the Ponemon Institute Cost of a Data Breach report 2020 stated that 23% of all the data breaches in 524 organizations in 17 countries were due to human error. Even paper records account for most of the data breaches in companies. The impermanent piece of paper is always prone to damage from thefts, natural disasters, or spoilage, leaving you helpless without any digital backup for the business continuity.
If you just revived from the thought of losing your business due to papers, be quick to think about a paperless office.
How Can You Embrace a Paperless Office?
You just need to start. Although shifting your paper-dependent office to digital footprints would take you a little long, but you can begin with the core operations of document processing – the accounts payable.
The AP department is in dire need of invoice automation to improve their productivity and reduce the time and costs involved in manual invoice processing. As your vendor invoices are the most important documents to be processed every month, invoice automation is best suited to commence paperless office initiatives.
“But we have already implemented invoice automation in our office”, you might say.
If you are referring to the traditional template-based OCR solutions as invoice automation, you are still far away from your best option. You cannot consider traditional OCR as automation if you receive a digital invoice and then manually scan invoice to excel by entering data into the respective fields. You are nevertheless dependent on humans to interpret the text from the digital invoice (image) or invoice hard copy and feed data into your ERP systems to process the payment.
Further, traditional OCRs can never understand the context and sometimes depend on templates to extract data from the invoices. They cannot interpret the field data themselves and require a human to cross-check, validate, and rectify the mistakes incurred.
Invoice automation is when software can convert the invoice image to text using AI and process the invoice for payment or further analytics without human intervention. From scanning the document to understanding the context, interpreting various fields, extracting data, and finally validating the authenticity of the process – the invoicing software has to do everything on its own.
The software we are referring to is a template-less, end-to-end automated, and AI-based document decision support system. Invoice automation, in its true sense, is the process of minimizing human intervention from the accounts payable department.
That’s how you wipe off a huge chunk of paper from your office premises – the first step towards a paperless office.
Okay! Now you know that invoice automation can lead to office automation soon but, how?
Don’t worry; we have listed some major benefits of invoice processing via AI-based OCR solutions.
As mentioned, AI-based OCR solutions provide a template-less, E2E automated, and document decision support for invoice processing. Such an approach is advantageous for businesses offloading their accounts payable processes and known as Intelligent Document Processing (IDP). Take a look at some primary benefits of IDP.
- Cost saving up to 90%
- High scalability
- Automation up to 95%
- E2E automated solutions
This is where KlearStack takes the lead in AI-based invoice processing automation.
How does KlearStack helps achieve paperless office culture?
KlearStack is an unconventional, AI-based data extraction software that works on the grounds of template-less data extraction, E2E invoice automation, and document decision support. The software gains an edge in the competition with the advantage of being template-independent. Not only it simplifies data extraction, but it also eliminates human intervention with intelligent data interpretation capabilities.
Converting an image to text using AI is no more human-dependent with KlearStack. With the ability to automate processes end-to-end and mine unstructured documents for actionable insights, KlearStack sets invoice automation as a perfect use-case for Intelligent Document Processing.
KlearStack also provides end-to-end document automation with the help of Straight Through Processing (STP). With the help of STP, KlearStack can validate data automatically and without any human intervention, documents are accurately processed to the backend. It provides an additional layer of automation to the intelligent document process.
So, if you are thinking about transitioning from papers to a paperless office, initiate the process with KlearStack’s invoice automation software. Contact us today to know more about how KlearStack is the best for your requirements.
