Is it possible to automate invoice processing and why should we do it?

If you’ve worked in an accounting department or someone close to you is building a career in this professional sector, then you probably know how difficult it can be to process invoices. Manual document work is not only time-consuming, but also carries the risk of errors in payment amounts, supplier/customer names or other key information.

For this reason, invoice automation process is something extremely useful in this case – with such technology, the organization of documents and the extraction of price information from them becomes much easier and faster, and the results of the accounting activity are reliable in all respects.

Essence of automated processing of invoices – main points

As we already said, the manual invoice processing might be tedious and the process difficult to manage. This is the reason why more and more companies (in most cases large ones) choose technology that automates the processing of invoices at all levels – from the acceptance of the document to its sending, all steps can be implemented without the direct participation of employees in the department. And something else very important:

  • with the help of the invoice automation process, the work style in the accounting department is completely changed, where a tense atmosphere is often felt as a result of the inability of employees to process the huge number of documents. Efficiency, reduction of time for trivial activities and elimination of the risk of human errors – all these advantages are only a minimal part of all the pluses that Smart Soft’ software offers to the users;
  • workflow optimization is high on the list of goals for many companies – small, medium and large – if until years ago the only option was the manual data entry, today employees and their managers have much more options for streamlining the accounting process. One of them is the technology for turning the manual invoice processing into automatic which is a huge relief for the busy employee. What does he earn? Time to focus on the really important (sometimes even critical) tasks;
  • achieving high accuracy and precision in invoice processing is a difficult goal to achieve in a number of respects – dozens and even hundreds of documents arrive daily in the accounting department, which employees then have to process, organize, and finally send to their recipient;
  • with the help of Invoice Processing Automation from Smart Soft, all this information exchange will be optimized, and the time to extract and organize the key information will be reduced several times.

So far it is clear that invoice automation process is something irreplaceable in various aspects. Starting from achieving perfect accuracy to saving valuable time for employees – such technologies are a must-have for small and large companies that want to develop and rationalize the work process in every department.

What are the steps? A brief description of each one of them

Invoice automation process involves several stages. The first step is the acceptance of the document – here there are several scenarios, because the invoice can enter the system in the form of a scanned document, by e-mail or through a special web portal, which many modern companies work with and exchange information with each other.

The next point is optical character recognition, or OCR for short. Here we are talking about a modern technology with an intelligent interface that allows the transformation of images into a digital format so that the information from the document can be extracted easily and correctly.

Such software developments are a big plus for the company, they can detect text in the received image, pre-process it, recognize characters with the help of used algorithms and correct errors as well. Another advantage of OCR is the ability to overcome challenges of a different nature – handwritten content and other difficulties.

What is OCR technology and how it participates in the process?

If we have to go deeper into the OCR technology, we would say that it is a key tool for achieving high accuracy when working with invoices. With its help, costs are reduced and efficiency is increased, and besides, it can be used for the processing of documents of different types, not only invoices.

OCR relies on a special optical mechanism that allows the recognition of symbols from images – their digitization allows their search afterwards as well as the possibility of their editing. The percentage of making trivial mistakes also decreases, and this also leads to positive results in a financial aspect.

Other important points during automatic invoice processing

Talking about the invoice automation process, it is appropriate to say something about the other stage of the process, namely the classification of company documents. It is fundamental to the processing afterwards – it precedes the choice of method by which to perform the analysis.

Classification involves identifying the document which includes determining the category it falls into, also determining the format of the document and applying algorithms to classify it according to what type it is as well.