While application areas of RPA (robotic process automation) are expanding steadily, one of the fastest growing area is back-office jobs and accounts payable (AP) operations. Companies who need to process high volumes of invoices periodically, suffer from complications of manual invoice processing.
Invoice processing is a key joint stage of many business operations. AP department needs to extract data from various invoice types and formats (PDF, printed etc.) and transfer these data into their own core system only after they verify the content. If this stage takes long to step further and discrepancies occur frequently, which is unavoidable during manual work, financial workflows start to tremble and fall.
How Can RPA Help to Optimize Account Payable Operations?
There are three main steps of AP automation through RPA:
- Monitoring incoming invoices: via e-mail attachments, folders, servers
- Invoice capture: extracting data with high accuracy (see onVision’s product)
- Validation/approval: evaluation of invoice content by AI
You can see details of these steps, and most frequent use cases in Simplilearn’s video below.
Outcomes of Invoice Processing Automation
- Among many benefits of automating invoice processing, we should emphasize key ones.
- Shorter cycle time for AP operations and due to it better financial planning and internal harmony.
- Compliance and audition requirements can be met easily, because RPA handles repetitive tasks which are prone to error with high precision.
- Companies streamline financial part of vendor management process and it leads to several improvements from production to customer satisfaction.
