Document Digitization

AIQoD :Blog :Document Digitization
CategoriesAutomation Challenges Document Digitization Invoice Automation RPA
byAnil Nair

Manual vs Automated Accounts Payable Process

According to Business Insider Report, 44% of businesses are looking to add automation to their payables processes as a way to capitalize on the efficiency and cost-cutting benefits it brings in, while also cutting fraud and increasing access to payment data.

Let us first understand what is Accounts Payable process, how it works presently, and its challenges:

Accounts Payable means the purchase of raw materials/goods on credit for a certain period of time and are considered as Current Liabilities in Accounting terms. 

The accounts payable process starts with receiving an invoice from the supplier via email, in physical form, or uploaded to a supplier portal; which is then sent to a person who may be an accountant or handling the accounts payable. Subsequently, details from invoices are extracted manually and entered into spreadsheets. After this, every invoice is subjected to a review and approval process. In an enterprise, the approval process includes verification steps which constitute the three way matching process which is done by matching the details in the Purchase Order(PO), Invoice, and the GRN(Goods Receipt Note).

Well, the approval process typically includes the steps of verification to ensure that the supplier is not giving any false information and has followed up on their part of an agreement before getting paid. The first step is to check if what is seen amounts to what is paid for and that it adheres to the stated criteria. Upon receipt, checking is done to see if there are any duplicates of invoices (which might have been fabricated) or missing products. Followed by checking, if the right payment amount has been settled. Once these checks confirm everything, the financial personnel proceeds with payments.  

The above-explained process is presently carried out manually in most enterprises today, thus, with the expansion of business at every stage it becomes more time-consuming, error-prone, and tedious activity that on average would take at least 25 days to complete.

Account Payable Automation

Let us see by adopting Account payable automation, how it reduces fraud-related payments and saves time and cost. 

Automated Accounts Payable processing involves automatically fetching/downloading multiple documents like Invoices, Credit Notes, Debit Notes, Purchase Orders(PO), etc. from different sources like emails, supplier portals, designated folders on desktops, etc. The information is extracted from these documents and validated using rules to check the currency, total amount, tax rate, tax amount, etc kind of factors to prevent fraud. Post initial validation automated reconciliation is carried out between PO and Invoice (2 Way) or between PO, Invoice & Goods Received Note (3 Way )depending upon the enterprise requirement on the digitized data. The exceptions are handled using automated workflows and alerts & notifications are sent to the stakeholders post-processing. These extracted fields and other information are automatically injected into Accounting/ERP/ other downstream systems for further processing. Role-based operational key analytics and dashboards are provided based on advanced technologies like AI, ML, OCRi, NLP, etc, to drive effective decision making.

 Accounts Payable Automation Solution processes PO & Non-PO invoices 10X faster, with error-free accounts payable data entries, automated matching  & reconciliation, thus providing a significant reduction in costs per transaction, better visibility into business operations, reducing overall turnaround time with automated workflows, along with touchless invoice processing, and scalability with cloud-based technology.

 For making your AP Processing faster, simpler, and more accurate with automation, get in touch with us at info@AIQoD.com.

CategoriesAutomation Document Digitization Invoice Automation RPA
byAnil Nair

Is Touchless Invoice a Myth?

According to research, last year, most of the AP Leaders suffered a miserable state, a majority of 60% still face lengthy invoice and payment approval times.  Invoice processing is the most important part of the accounts payable process, which is mostly performed manually. This blog will discuss how to use automation in invoice processing and make the process easier.

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CategoriesAutomation Document Digitization RPA Video KYC
byAnil Nair

Five Senses & Hyper-Automation

Hyper-Automation is the automation of activities that were done by humans and exactly the way we would expect humans to do it. When we look at automation of activities it is primarily driven by the 5 human senses and humans have tried to mimic those in the real world and to elevate human life. 

From driverless cars to smart virtual assistants, from biometric sensors to connected devices, from smart cities to connected homes; the use of technology has become widespread. Many activities that we used to do physically are already automated, it has become a new norm for all of us and the future would be even more interesting with some amazing technologies shaping our lives in the coming years.

Similarly Automation has become one of the biggest needs for enterprises to improve efficiency, save cost, and also to speed up their operations. Automation empowers organizations by helping them embrace these new technologies with ease and reap the benefits of the technology through different platforms which gives that edge to the enterprises.

5 Senses Hyper intelligence

Hyper Intelligence

Let’s try to draw an analogy between our senses and  Automation :

  1. Sense of Touch: Touch refers to the human ability to use our fingers/surface of the skin in ways that allow us to identify our surroundings. In organizations, there are a lot and lots of people who are actually doing touch-based activities that help them to make appropriate decisions.  For example, Invoice Data-Entry is such a process, wherein an organization that receives vendors’ invoices on the generation of purchase orders while purchasing/ordering some equipment/service. These invoices are actually punched into Accounting/ERP systems by individuals in the accounts department. This task is time-consuming, prone to manual errors, and a cumbersome task to deal with.

Technology like Intelligent information management has been there in this segment, a few examples of those would be Accounts Payable Automation, Accounts Receivable Automation, etc.  These technologies help to make the whole process automated by fetching documents from multiple sources, sorting them, and extracting details of required fields; these details are then reconciled/matched with other documents and finally punched into Accounting/ERP systems without much human intervention except in the case of exceptions.

  1. Sense of Hearing: Sense of Hearing helps us to communicate with our surroundings by experiencing the vibrations created by sound. Let’s take an example, we are all familiar with Call centers, you need to call the helpline number of a firm, in case you need to reach out to them. Someone would pick up the call and answer your queries.

Now, this physical process is automated using Chatbots, IVRs, etc. So as soon as you open the website a chatbot appears welcoming you and straightaway asking you for your queries, you just need to type your question, and most of the time you get responses from the chatbot itself, in a faster and aligned response equivalent to your expectation.

  1. Sense of Sight: One of the most powerful senses of humans that makes us see the world as it is, guides us and helps us in clear processing and understanding of things around us through proper visualization and interpretation.

Let’s understand the technology equivalent for the same:

A. OCR(Optical Character Recognition) 

OCR is an older technology that is in existence for the past but over time has been advanced using modern technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, etc to enhance the processing capability similar to lenses and spectacles we use to improve our eye’s visibility.

From the organization’s perspective, if we talk about document processing of invoices, usually the accounting personnel looks at the invoice, reads it and interprets the data, and then punches it into the ERP system. This process of manual processing under workload conditions is prone to issues like manual typing errors, skipping of fields, misplacing of documents, wrong entries,etc

This has been replaced with the OCR technology which actually scans through the documents and extracts the information corresponding to different fields and accurately copies the data to the ERP/Accounting system without any errors and that also in a quick and efficient manner.

B. Face Detection:

This is one of the peculiar features of our eyes which helps us in recognizing individuals, places, and things to interpret, visualize and process information related to them.

Similarly, in the organizations this activity was usually done by the security guard standing at a gate where the person is actually verifying his/her ID card, verifying the person who’s actually getting into a building for security checks. 

This manual process now gets replaced by the technology of Face Detection & Recognition, the software recognizes faces and then lets the individual in through the security checks. This technology is employed for multiple scenarios like attendance management, fraud management in insurance organizations, and video KYC in Banking & Insurance, surveillance & threat management at airports and other such locations, etc.

  1. Sense of Speech:

The power to converse between individuals is also a key differentiator between humans and machines that helps them to express their feelings, share their thoughts and speak out their views.

We are all aware of modern technologies which all of us might have used or encountered like Alexa, Siri, Google Home, etc. in our day-to-day lives. Now we believe that in the future this technology is going to get into our professional lives as well where most of the operations could be executed using the power of speech, where instructions taken by machines will help us get things done.

  1. Sense of Smell :

The sense of smell is another important sense that humans possess to help us detect desirable foods, hazards, etc in our surroundings.

On the technology side, there are bots that are built to smell odors. For example, E-nose, these bots are used in very hazardous environments like chemical factories to detect the smell and identify leakages, etc,. These can also be employed at places where human lives cannot be risked and after-effects of the leak, explosion, bombing, etc have to be sensed for the viability of existence. 

 So in a nutshell, for activities that are manual and repetitive in nature, Hyper-automation can be used to bridge the gap to help grow in a more efficient and faster manner. Technology and its innovation are for the empowerment of humans and not for their replacement, they will help us to excel, innovate and focus on more strategic activities.

For more insights on how to ” Enable the Digital Enterprise of the Future using Intelligent information management” view our webinar.

CategoriesDocument Digitization
byShailaja G

5M’s of Document Digitization

Documents are part of every organization in one or the other form and handling/processing them become a cumbersome task when they are in bulk and when there is a huge number of documents to be processed manually.

Usually, an organization encounters the following major problems while dealing with its documents:

1. Manual Errors

It is a common proverb that says “To err is to human”. Manual errors are a part of documents whether are missing document entries, misplacing documents, typing errors, or errors with digits in financial documents leading to losses. These result in rework to find and rectify the error caused and usually gets unnoticed due to the workload and is realized only when the error can’t be corrected. It is the most common problem encountered by staff members which is tiring, and time-consuming and is also responsible for about 62 percent of the cost being incurred by organizations for labor.

2. Managing Inefficiencies

Efficiency in simpler terms is a ratio between the output and input. To improve efficiencies organizations usually tend to decrease their input as much as possible to reap the maximum output. But in the case of documents the scenario is worse, due to the number of documents generated daily, it is not only time-consuming but also laborious to manage the efficiency.

Other than this the type of information to be used from structured or unstructured sources makes the process more complicated and adds delay and further decreases the efficiency.

3. Maintaining Audit Trail

Auditing is a process that helps in matching the to and from the movement of information in any kind of document. It is not as simpler as it seems in the previous sentence as it includes the individual matching the information on all the documents from where it has been used from. For example, in the case of Invoices- the manual invoice is to be matched with the Purchase Order (PO) and the Goods Receivable Note (GRN) to reconcile the entries and release the payments. But as the example states, the more the number of items in the invoice as well as the invoices generated/ received by any organization daily/weekly/monthly the job becomes more complicated, prone to errors and inaccuracies, and hard to deliver within the stipulated time.

4. Manual Data Entry

Data Entry is a kind of job wherein an individual manually sits and enters the information on the documents in paper format in the ERP or other financial documents of the organization so as to ease the processing. But since it is being entered manually field by field, item by item, etc. by the individual the chances of typing errors, fields being missed and entries in wrong fields are common. These account for about tons of information being approved by top authorities and consumes too much time as well to digitize the information on the paper prone to errors and decreased accuracy.

5. Meeting Deadlines

The documents usually in the form of invoices, contracts, bills, etc. are to be processed within a given time limit to be realized in the systems as well as for payments to be carried out. The increased workloads, busy schedules, and delays in approval leads to lost opportunities and tarnish the relationship between the stakeholders of the organization. Another challenge is the uneven workload and too much load during the last few days of the month-end or quarter-end or filing process.

Are you fed up with these M’s? Then it is time for your organization or business to consider automating the document digitization process to eliminate the errors, save time and improve your overall efficiency and accuracy.

For more information, contact us for a demo at info@AIQoD.com