Imagine 100's to 1,000's of Supplier Invoices Processed Without Any Manual Keying

Imagine 100's to 1,000's of Supplier Invoices Processed Without Any Manual Keying

The accounts payable process can be a time consuming and labor-intensive process. Invoices arrive on a daily basis, some be email and some by postal service. The accounts payable staff generally have a daily routine which involves a few things:

• Printing emailed invoices
• Opening envelopes
• Organizing invoices by type and priority

Once the supplier invoices are organized and invoices that require approval are then distributed to the approvers for review, approval and assignment to the ledger. The approval process comes with it's own set of challenges:

• Manual invoice approvals are slow
  
• The lack of visibility makes it difficult for the AP Staff
• Generally there are no controls when it comes to this process

If procurement is issuing Purchase Orders, then any incoming invoices that reference an issued purchase order will have a PO number on it. The invoices with PO numbers will need to be matched against the actual Purchase Order to ensure there are no discrepancy with the pricing or items ordered.

• Matching PO invoices is very slow and tedious
  
• Often times invoices don't match due to pricing issues, freight and extra charges
  
• Exception invoices are difficult to manage and often times result in a lot of back and forth
  

In order to process invoices for payment the AP Staff are required to enter invoices into the financial system in order to issues the payment to the supplier. The process of entering invoices requires the AP Staff to manually key all of the relevant details on each and every invoice into the financial system. Not only is this a very slow process, this isn't make very good use of the AP Staff's time.

• Extremely slow process which can consume 50 - 80 percent of the AP Staffs day
  
• The process of manual keying invoices is prone to errors
  
• This step, although necessary is not adding any value
  

The traditional approach to processing accounts payable invoices relies heavily on people and manual processes. With advent of Accounts Payable Workflow it made it easier to automatically route invoices to approvers using electronic workflow queues. Now let's take that a step further as Accounts Payable Automation leverages both invoice workflow and automated PO invoice matching and by combining both of these with integration to the financial system the ability exists to completely eliminate the need to manually enter or key invoices for payment processing.