RPA Invoice Automation

rpa for invoice automation, automating invoice process, intelligent data capture, what is rpa, benefits of rpa in invoice automation

ROBOTIC PROCESS AUTOMATION FOR INVOICE AUTOMATION

Did you exhaust processing huge volumes of invoices daily? Are you not able to focus on higher value-added tasks? You can speed up the invoice processing with RPA. Robotic process automation can transform finance teams with invoice process automation end-to-end. Financial services are one area where RPA is getting implemented. While most financial organizations rely on manual processes. Manual data entry and inefficient processes as their biggest challenge. Many businesses struggle with the lengthy labor-intensive and costly tasks of processing invoices. It's been calculated the average cost for UK business is between 4 and 25 pounds per invoice. While reworking keyboard mistakes can cost a large organization up to one million dollars annually.

Benefits of switching to automated systems

Switching to an automated system can free up your finance team, grow your organization, reduce days outstanding. Also, improve your cash flow, improve supplier relations, and prepare you for a compliance audit. So how do we make the invoice process fully automated?

Automating a manual process

With automated invoice processing, a software robot will start by selecting an email with an attachment. Then open the invoice from the attachment, invoice data is then captured from the invoice using optical character recognition or OCR technology. The information is then validated by the robot or a human, and relevant data from that invoice is input into a finance or accounting system. These are typical tasks an account payable team member would do to process an invoice. There may be a slight variation in the process within your business. But, the basic workflow and tasks remain the same for all businesses.

Automating invoice processing workflow

Using RPA, the robot looks for any new invoices in the designated mailbox. It opens the attachment and uses the invoice information extracted. It sends the invoice to a member of the team for approval or payment and also updates the accounting or finance system with invoice details. The robot starts looking in the mailbox for invoices and has identified the invoice attachment. It processes these invoices and flags any errors such as emails without attachments which will be forwarded to a member of the accounts team. Now that we have digitized the invoice information.

The approval and payment process from here those invoices go to the intelligent document processor this will analyze and extract. The data from each invoice you can see various line items of data being extracted the documents will either pass straight through or if any errors are found they will exit the workflow for human attention and validation. As you can see this invoice has been flagged so a human can now intervene and line up the data with the relevant information fields.

How the robot can transfer the invoice data into back-end financial systems automatically and trigger the workflow for approval?

The robot will now log into your financial systems and input all the data it has extracted from all the invoices. This increases the effectiveness of this process reduces errors and frees up your finance team for more value-added tasks. You can try IBM RPA and IBM Datacap as a part of IBM Cloud pak for automation. This gives you the complete toolkit to define tasks and workflows and empowers you to automate processes in line with your business rules.

What is intelligent data capture?

Hundreds of documents enter a business every day. Each document contains data either in a structured format like forms or invoices or unstructured like data from social media or websites which needs to be identified, processed, and stored. Intelligent data capture can transform this disjointed data into business-rich information. This software streamlines the capturing of incoming documents, recognition of what type of document it is, and the classifying sorting and saving of the data from it. 

Intelligent data capture can recognize the different documents pouring into a business daily including emails, digital pdfs, and digital images with recognition happening the moment the document hits your server. As the documents are scanned and recognized intelligent data capture will extract the required structured or unstructured data from that document. The data will then be classified and sent to a destination of your choice or directly to employees to start working with. You can start intelligent workflows from the moment a document enters your organization using AI-infused intelligent processing to export vital information to many targets within an adaptable workflow.

What is Robotic Process Automation or RPA?

It enters data into reports, copying data between two systems, or processes invoices. These tasks along with many others within a typical business day could be considered repetitive, mundane, time-consuming, and are often not the best use of an employee's time. RPA uses software bots or digital workers to perform these mundane business tasks. RPA can be configured to trigger responses such as sending an email, entering and manipulating huge quantities of data. Communicating with other digital systems. It can also be configured to complete tasks such as copying and pasting data between two systems. Collecting and updating data in disconnected systems and applications or entering data from different websites and external portals. Using RPA to automate these tasks means they can be done quicker, more cost-effective, and with fewer errors. You also free up valuable employees' time to tackle more complex tasks. RPA bots become your digital workforce and have the ability to work around the clock 24 hours a day 7 days a week and 365 days a year with sports working in the background. Your employees are now freed up to tackle more high-value tasks to a greater degree of productivity and efficiency.

Benefits of RPA in Invoice Automation

Creating cost relevant savings for manual and automated tasks

Enhanced customer experience

Streamlined supplier invoice data

Error removal

Reduce the amount of time with simplified workflows

Providing enhanced efficiency.

Conclusion

Using robotics process automation you can automate all your repetitive tasks. You can reduce human errors and make your business processes faster and efficient. By doing this you will increase your employee efficiency.

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