Manual invoice processing is fractured but here’s how to fix it

Have you noticed that your invoice processing has been long and tedious? Doing its manual tasks can be risky and time-consuming.

According to The Institute of Finance and Management (IOFM), around 84% of the regular accounts payable practitioner’s time is wasted on manual tasks. Accounts payable managers spend a lot of time doing these processes rather than focusing on more urgent issues. 

The study also revealed that 71% of businesses plan to automate their accounts payable in 2020. Enterprises that are even automated are planning to have more technology.

To have a clear look at the challenges and solutions, let’s take a look at what automation can do! 

What are the challenges? 

• Time-consuming and labor-intensive task 
• Delays at every stage 
• Forgotten lost, and duplicated invoices 
• Lack of visibility 
• High risk of late-payment fees from suppliers 

The list above shows the financial issues with manual invoice processing. It increases other issues like fraud and budget allocation errors that are not easy to track. These challenges could lead to big issues in the accounting system. 

What are the solutions? 

• Process Automation
• View the entire automation process digitally 
• Faster approval processes 
• Full transparency between departments

These points show that manual challenges can be solved with automation. It basically lets you and your team streamline processes and receive visibility. This saves you costs in the long run. 

Third Pillar and Automation Hero helps businesses process invoices the smarter way.

Our proven intelligent Invoice Document Processing (IDP) approach is powered by Automation Hero’s Documents AI technology.

1. Clients can just scan invoices as simple as taking a photo using their mobile phones and tablets, then uploading them in online storage.
2. Or they can upload invoice attachments from emails or their local computer directly into the online storage.
3. Just 2 steps! Once the invoices are stored online, Automation Hero will process your invoices automatically. The rest are handled by the platform.

The AI and automation results are phenomenal.
This system reduces the manual workload by up to 80%, only leaving those complex scenarios that can’t be handled by the AI.

Structured Digital Documents can be captured with great ease.

Unstructured Documents such as this hand-written receipt is no challenge for Automation Hero’s character recognition technology.

Do you want to know more about how automation works in invoicing processing?

Read more about accounting automation.