Invoice Automation: Automating Critical Business Processes for a True Digital Future

3 minutes read
on 13 November, 2019

Automating Critical Business Processes for a True Digital Future

 

Invoice Automation

 

 

Invoice
Automation

 

 

Invoice automation (also called automated invoice processing) is in the progressive stage of robotic process automation, which carries a significant value with reduced operational risks and adding valuable support to the organization. Invoice automation helps automate major time consuming and repetitive manual tasks at the backend of an enterprise.


Invoice automation grants straight-through processing without the requirement of any human involvement in the entire invoice process. Invoice automation includes tracking for invoices which reach to companies in different file formats like words, Jpeg, PDF, etc. and very often in hard copy papers and documents.

In case of any digital invoices, any general email automation tool or RPA bot can indicate emails with distinguished invoices and forward them quickly for extracting data from it. Organizations are shifting focus towards using a uniform address to centralize invoice scanning for maintaining hard copy invoices.

 

 

Capturing Invoice


Extracting required data like bank account details and order details from the invoice. Sometimes the software is not sure about the authentication process, thus the invoice needs to be sent to employees for a manual check and confirmation.

 

 

Revising Invoice


On order records and other processes, to make sure that the payment process and gateway is definitely a valid one.

Evaluation includes the following processes

 

 


  • Crdoss-checking on all the available invoice on all the orders

  • Carefully cross-checking invoice to avoid duplicity

  • Implementing human labor policies to decide payment time and gateway, making it easy to decide whether to manually process an invoice or to continue with the automation process.

  • Accumulating information on the invoice in systems

  • Creating the necessary payment to settle the invoice
    All the above processes excluding the invoice capture are completely based on rules. However, invoice capture completely depends on machine learning to pull out the required data from the invoice.
    Before automation, back-office teams would

  • Review invoices to get a better understanding of the relevant data in the invoice

  • Storing it to the relevant systems so each and every payments and system records would be up to date


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Artificial Intelligence for invoice processing will be much more advanced and will have more salient features, including detection of fault transactions, predictive analytics on spending trends, and auditing expenditure.

 

 

Benefits of invoice automation

 

 


  • Lowers operational costs in invoice processing

  • Improves productivity and add higher value

  • Decreases invoice processing errors

  • Importance of Invoice Automation


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Since the complete invoice management process is totally digital, many companies neglect invoice processing automation. This would be a huge mistake because even though the entire business ecosystem is digital but without automation there is a huge dependency on human workforces. In a digital set-up prior to automation, the invoices, the extracted data and the payment methods are digital but the process is no less time consuming than a completely analog process.

 

 

Conclusion


Allocating human workforce in executing repetitive manual tasks across the digital workflow is a critical issue as companies concentrate on digitizing the business operations, keeping automation technologies at bay. But currently, this issue is slowly getting fixed as companies are more shifted towards investing in implementation of automation technologies to automate repetitive processes. They attain this mostly with Robotic Process Automation.
It can be expected that in near future, Artificial Intelligence for invoice processing will be much more advanced and will have more salient features, including detection of fault transactions, predictive analytics on spending trends, and auditing expenditure. The growing possibilities to implement Artificial Intelligence for invoices are nearly infinite: from cleaning invoice payments and making them primary, the entire processes are based on a set of internal rules to monitor financial and bankruptcy risks by analyzing the balance. RPA coupled with Artificial intelligence has very high potentials of revolutionizing the business process automation landscape.