Discover the attraction and benefits of using intelligent automation (IA) in Accounts Payable and read about the key components to successfully automate invoice processing. Our latest project resulted in a high-tech firm saving time and improving quality.
Intelligent Automation and AI Agents in Invoice Processing
There is a lot of content about using intelligent automation (IA) for Invoice Processing. For many organizations, accounts payable is where they start their automation journey. The legacy process of automating invoicing can be complex, with many non-standard formats and approvals.
However, most organizations (and some service providers) assume that this makes it easy to achieve actual results with IA. But the fact is, many invoice automation projects have failed to deliver the expected results. There are also specific cases where clients have been extremely successful.
The appeal of using intelligent automation in accounts payable is that AP (Accounts Payable) is a low-risk function with rules-driven processes, often handling a high volume of transactions that are currently processed manually.
Let a member of the WonderBotz team help you successfully Automate Invoice Processing in your organization.
What makes the difference between success and failure with Intelligent Automation in Accounts Payable?
Let us look at an example of a successful Intelligent Automation project in Accounts Payable.
The client is a global high-tech firm headquartered in California that specializes in Internet connections and data centers. This firm has saved tens of thousands of hours in processing time through invoice automation.
It is not just about the hours saved – it is about the quality of their teams’ working environment, the freedom this creates to do higher-value analysis, and the fact that the bots work 24 hours a day, error-free, with a clear and accessible audit trail of actions.
The four key components to successfully automate invoice processing.
- The invoices that you are trying to process.
- The IA platform that you will use to automate your invoice processing.
- The Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) solution that you are using to extract the data from these invoices.
- And the ERP solution that you are using as your AP system.
1. The complexity of the invoices you seek to process.
In this case study, the firm receives most of its invoices via email. These invoices have the same common, recurring information, regardless of how they are laid out and structured:
- Header, with some header data
- Footer with some footer information, like totals and sub-totals, tax, and shipping data.
- Line items were line items with quantity, unit price, and the total amount for that line.
- They can have a single page or hundreds of pages.
- A single PDF document that comprises multiple invoices.
- Content could be in English, Chinese, Spanish, or German.
- It could be in the U.S. Dollar, British pound, Singapore dollar, or one of 100+ other currencies.
- It may be a PO invoice or a non-PO invoice.
- It could be a credit memo or a statement of accounts.
That is an incredible number of variations and an even bigger number of permutations.
2. The IA platform that you will use to automate your invoice processing.
The firm in this case study is using one of the leading RPA robotic platforms. You can choose from many platforms, including UiPath, Tungsten/Kofax, Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, Microsoft PA, and others. The decision is yours. We can help you with that decision, or you may already have chosen a strategic platform.
3. The IDP solution that you are using to extract the data from these invoices.
You might be using ABBYY or Tungsten, both leading IDP platforms. You might be using IBM Data Cap or one of the built-in features of your Intelligent automation, such as SS&C Blue Prism Decipher or the UIPath Document Understanding.
4. The ERP solution that you are using as your AP system.
You can use SAP, Oracle, or any other accounts payable/ERP package. How did this major firm deliver one of the most successful automation programs for invoice processing when many others have failed to achieve any value from IA? The answer is a pre-built solution that is the foundation of their results in automating invoice processing. It is one of our fast-to-implement solutions, targeted at finance and accounting teams, to enable successful invoice processing using IA.
How Pre-Built Solutions Work in Accounts Payable
InvoiceBotz is a smart, engineered intelligent automation and cognitive document-processing solution that uses your AP system to handle PO and non-PO invoices from receipt through registration.
Speed-to-value, since they are deployable in less than a month, for your top 20 supplier invoices.
This can be easily extended to other suppliers to further improve invoice processing throughput and reach your target. And, with an additional extension, you can even initiate payment after the approver signs off on the invoice.
InvoiceBotz comes ready with business rules for handling extracted invoice data.
These are externally configurable during solution deployment. This set of business rules is the crux of increasing the quality of invoice processing. It answers questions such as how do I handle:
- Invoices when a supplier is set in different locations?
- A situation where the PO line description is different from the line on the invoices?
- Invoices that come in multiple currencies in each line item?
- Installment payments?
- The logic for duplicate invoices?
There are 30+ out-of-the-box business rules included in the Invoice solution, with more being added all the time.
OCR and IDP – how intelligent document processing extracts data from invoices.
OCR (Optical Character Recognition) allows InvoiceBotz to read and understand the fields on incoming invoices. But it is the application of the business rules that makes the solution more successful and faster.
In addition, InvoiceBotz can be configured with parameters configured externally for the process automation, for example:
- How invoices are received.
- Where invoices are stored.
- Choice of IDP platform for data extraction.
- How invoice PDFs should be loaded into the AP system.
These are the built-in components that make this solution powerful, effective, and quick to implement, regardless of your business’s size.
How Do the WonderBotz’s Accounts Payable and Invoice Automation Solutions Actually Work?
InvoiceBotz makes this happen in five steps:
1. Receiving The Invoices.
So, a digital worker, a software robot, continuously monitors an email account or a shared drive for new invoices, much like a human would.
Once it receives invoices, it then saves the new invoice to the robot work queue.
Then comes the second step: extracting data.
2. Extracting the data from these invoices
The robot now works with the underlying intelligent document-processing platform to extract data from these invoices.
Some of these IDP platforms use AI agents and machine learning to train their engine to improve data extraction quality over time.
3. The quality loop to improve the data quality.
The quality loop is unique and proprietary to our solution. Now that the data from the previous step, which has been extracted using the OCR platform, is still raw.
The robot then uses a set of business rules to further cleanse, validate, transform, and confirm that the data is ready for consumption by the AP system.
4. The audit loop to ensure that the right quality of invoices is going into the AP system.
During the quality loop, the rules are applied to catch errors early and tag them.
For situations where an additional audit is required or when the confidence level of IDP data extraction falls below a certain threshold, these invoices can now be redirected to the AP team for a human to perform further checks and corrections.
Once corrected again by the human, the AP team can click a button, and the invoice flows into the process, moving to the next step.
5. Registering the invoices.
And the last step is to receive the invoices or register them in the system. Now that this data quality is assured, the robot prepares the invoice data for loading into the AP system.
Once these invoices have been created in the AP system, the robot uploads the individual PDF documents of these invoices to the AP system.
So, to summarize, a successful prebuilt solution such as InvoiceBotz provides business-managed, low-touch invoice processing from receipt to registration, using IDP, AI agents and IA. This reduces manual keying, focusing your AP team on exceptions and higher-value analysis that only people can perform.