CategoriesAutomation Challenges Document Digitization Invoice Automation RPA

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

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

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.

CategoriesAutomation RPA

Intelligent Automation- Driving your competitive advantage through RPA and Beyond

A lot of people have asked me about my vision for AIQoD. Let me start by giving the basic definition of (IIM)Intelligent information Management which is the cornerstone of what we are doing today.

Any process which is definable and repeatable can be automated using a software robot and is referred to as IIM (Intelligent information management) In recent times IIM has taken a centre stage due to the demand for bringing efficiency, reducing human errors and in turn eliminating many jobs from the market. According to Harvard business review, human error costs almost $3 trillion per year in the US alone. According to NASSCOM domestic businesses can cut costs by 65% using IIM with an ROI of 30% to 200% in the first year itself. With cut-throat competition in the market, the only way is to automate and save the huge price that we are paying for human errors.

Believe it or not, we are entering into an era where machines are going to take most of our work and we will have to find ways and means to evolve and still be relevant. This itself is a big topic of discussion on its own so for this blog, I will confine myself to IIM and AIQoD vision.

IIM market is growing at a rate of 36% and it is expected to grow to $8.75 B by 2024. Slowly IIM will grow beyond automation of repeated tasks to take shape of cognitive automation where machines will be doing intelligent operations. These cognitive tasks are done through constant learning by machines using AI technology. Next stage of automation would be the combination of predictive analysis and cognitive automation which will eliminate the need of human analysis for most of the known problems we are handling, tasks that we are doing in today’s world. The best example is the recently launched google assistant by Google CEO, “Mr Sundar Pichai” machines taking over human work is a reality and as every year passes by this capability is leapfrogging us into the future, beyond what our imagination can take us today.

Although its still a long way to go but in a distant future, I believe machines are going to develop human intelligence and will start existing and expanding on its own and I too dread for that day.

Coming back to the vision, AIQoD as an organization was built to implement exactly what was described above and we are building software bots that perform specific activities. In one of the recent products which we have released for Beta testing we have used a combination of OCR, NLP and AI to read Invoices and extract the contents and make it available for accounting or compliance systems which eliminates the need of human capital being used to enter all these invoices into the system manually and we can proudly say that we are among a couple of organizations to achieve this feet and the first one in India.

We will keep exploring newer areas where automation can take shape in the form of bots and make the overall process effective and efficient.

Keep watching this space for what future has in store for all of us as we are building exactly that.

Are you using automation in your business processes today? Discover how you can make the most of the latest technology. Contact us on +91 8888500068 or info@AIQoD.com