Why should you automate invoice processing anyway?

Optiform is in the front line of all conversations with new and prospective clients. Accounts Payable professionals from a multitude of industries like yours call on Optiform when they understand that they have business process inefficiency that needs to be improved. Invoice processing is one of the easiest processes within an organization to automate utilizing software like ABBYY Flexicapture for Invoices.

The best questions come from those who have not yet implemented an invoice or document management solution.

Things like:

• Will it save me money on the overall invoice processing process?
• Is it easy?
• Should I still keep the paper invoice that was mailed to me?
• How do I find an invoice after it has been processed?

Questions like these help us develop content that helps you understand why you should consider automation.

Save Money

At the end of the day, it all boils down to ROI and the money you’re saving.

Expenses come in a variety of categories, but the top two mentions are:

• Hourly rate for staff to receive, sort, deliver, and manually transcribe the invoices
• Reproducing a lost document is another large cost to consider

Do you know how much your company spends to process invoices? If not, the PayStream Advisor’s calculator can help figure out the cost of processing your company’s invoices here.

Reduce Paper Storage

The 2016 Data Capture and Mailrooms Technology Insight Report released recently by PayStream Advisors and ABBYY showed that a whopping 50% of invoices are still received as paper invoices. Check out the chart on the right that we snagged from the report.
If you still have 50% of your vendors submitting regular invoices, think about how much paper you will have in files in your office that someone has to manually process. After they are processed, your records team is filing the documents in the appropriate files (you hope).
When do you purge them? If it is the standard 7 years, you may need to find some new ways of decorating your office that accounts for file cabinets because they will be around for a while.
Paper isn’t the only offender slowing you down. There is also a large percentage of vendors emailing invoices to you. What happens when your accounts payable team is receiving an invoice via email? You guessed it; they print it. Same with fax which only represents a small percentage of the population.

Only a small sliver of the pie shown above have begun the process of automation or are fully in the swing of automation.

Eliminate Errors

Human error is expected. Is it wanted? No, but it is expected. One person processing hundreds of invoices each day or week, depending on how large your company is, is going to make mistakes. With an automated invoice processing solution in place, your accounts payable team can scan the invoices in a batch job once per week, or whatever timeframe you set, and with OCR and a trained invoice processing solution, your invoices will all be recognized, sorted, assigned to the vendor profile in your ERP, and will be processed and paid when your company is ready to pay, not when the team is finally finished manually typing in the data submitted by the vendor. The benefit of scanning and capturing to process invoices is that there is very little, if any, manually entered and processing of data.

Ease of Use

A solution like ABBYY FlexiCapture for Invoices truly is easy to use. It is literally point-and-click to train and then once you are fully set up, you are essentially hands off until there is an invoice that comes in that may not be fully recognizable or a new one that may need to be introduced to the system and trained. Once you have introduced the new invoice to your system and trained it to be processed, you shouldn’t have to do any additional work with that vendor’s invoices, unless they change the format/layout of their invoices.
ABBYY has provided a really nice interactive demo that demonstrates just how simple it can be for your staff to extract data from an invoice. Once you’ve tested that out, watch the video below for additional details.

Check out this demo video by ABBYY:

Accessibility and Searchability

Finally, one of the best features when you automate invoice processing; search. How many times have you had to go to a file cabinet and locate an invoice due to a discrepancy in either payment sent or a purchase order not matching the invoiced amount? With an invoice processing solution, you are able to easily process data with purchase order matching; even if the person that receives the purchase order is different from the person that is processing the invoice, all because you have an automated solution in place. Once they have been processed, there will be minimal issues with finding the proper documents because they are all stored in your database and searchable by anyone within the company that has been granted access by way of custom user roles.

Give your Accounts Payable Team a Hand

When you automate invoice processing, it reduces the time it takes to get your vendors paid on time and accurately. With ABBYY FlexiCapture for Invoices, whether you are receiving paper invoices in the mail, emailed invoices, or faxed invoices, having a solution in place that scans and processes invoices via custom workflows will save you team time, headaches, and money.

Give us a call today or fill out our contact form. Our sales team can share more with you about what we can do to help you.