According to the Management Events report "Beyond Finance: Rise of the Digital CFO," 65 percent of respondents prioritize OCR as a technology investment. However, using OCR technology is not the solution to future-proof your organization.
Deployment of OCR technology can be misleading. Indeed, while an OCR solution initially reduces human intervention, it does not necessarily reduce the overall workload: font, paper quality, folding and receiving stamps affect the readability of the image pixels to be interpreted and make human validation of the data indispensable.
And if you want to use OCR to not only capture data at the invoice header level, but also process line-level items, it can become costly.
So if you are among the 65 percent of financial officers who see OCR as an important technology, you may want to reconsider.
Networks and formats
Another issue that arises in practice is that the world of e-invoicing is characterized by a wide range of formats and hundreds of, often unconnected, networks (billing service providers). Consequently, a large-scale rollout of e-invoicing to the supplier base is often very challenging.
And in addition to being able to receive invoices in a structured way, there is also a strong need for companies to check them for information from their own ERP/backend system such as for supplier information (CoC/VAT number), phantom invoices and checking for duplicate invoices. These types of error-prone processes are often done manually (retrospectively or otherwise).
Touchless invoice receipts
So what is the answer? With the right tools, it is possible to run these challenging processes virtually without human intervention and thus "touchless.
How. First, many companies are not yet sufficiently aware that on average about 70 percent of PDF invoices are machine readable. Machine readable means that pdf files have been generated by a vendor's software system and have a certain degree of structure. Therefore, thanks to AI technology such as smart coding, these pdf invoices are easier to process than a so-called flat pdf document (image). Currently, these machine readable PDFs are therefore still unnecessarily processed by OCR solutions.
Second, the rollout of e-invoicing to suppliers becomes easier if companies use an open (rather than closed) billing service provider network, which is directly connected to other networks through roaming agreements and also supports the most common invoice formats. Especially if this includes the right onboarding strategy.
Assess your own situation
There are a number of different ways to automate and then continuously improve your invoice receipt process. To do this, it is first good to know where you currently stand.
ICreative has created a self-assessment for you to gain insight into the current level of automation of the invoice reception process within your company. The more often you answered "yes" to these questions, the lower the level of automation of the invoice receipt process.
Assess which statements are true for your organization:
- We receive from many suppliers still pdf and/or paper invoiceswhich we still have to scan manually andand/or validate (with or without an OCR-solution).
- We receive invoices from suppliers, which we type into our ERP/backend system ourselves.m.
- Our suppliers support a variety of invoice formats (XML variants, UBL, EDI, industry-specific etc.) and communicatie methods, allowing us to (part of) cannot read these invoices directly into our systems.
- We are connected to one or multiple network(s) of billing service providers, but with that we can only reach a limited number of suppliers when it comes to e-facturatie.
- The percentage of invoices that via e-invoicing and thus structured received (xml, UBL, etc.), is lower than 75% of the number of invoices.
- We regularly receive invoices with incorrect dates, duplicate invoices or even phantom invoices, the verification of which is, enrichment and adjustments must be performed manually.
Process improvement as a key focus
If your organization sees improving the invoice receipt process - and perhaps more broadly, the entire purchase-to-pay process - as a key focus (for example, in the context of cost savings), there are undoubtedly gains to be made with e-invoicing, high-quality invoice data and determining the right onboarding strategy for your suppliers.
ICreative, as a reseller of the largest open business network, Basware Network, combined with its own validation and onboarding services, offers a total package when it comes to maximum automation of the invoice receipt process.
For more information or a no-obligation consultation contact
