Invoice Processing: How Does a Hybrid Approach Benefit YOU
Proper invoice processing is a vital function of enterprise success. Whether you’re receiving tens of invoices, hundreds, or thousands, the ability to quickly and accurately process invoice data improves back-office efficiency and protects your bottom line from slow approvals or entirely missed payments.
Manual vs. Automated Invoice Processing
Manual is the antithesis of efficiency, and physical paper is gum in the gears of productivity. If manual and paper-driven describe your current state of invoicing, then you’re likely very familiar with the time it can take an invoice to go from a service or product provided to a payment made. The hassle and expense of paper further compounds with storage and documentation. That’s why invoice digitization is key.
Invoice digitization relies on invoice scanning software utilizing Capture technology and optical character recognition (OCR) to quickly transform your important documents into a digestible format by your ERP or ECM. Invoice scanning eliminates the need for manual data entry, which saves time. But is it always accurate?
Unfortunately, even super-smart AI and OCR can make mistakes. These mistakes occur when scanners attempt to lift text from hard-to-read sources. Common causes for illegible documents include faded printer text, text from a picture of a picture, or messily hand-written or cursive notes.
While speedy automatic invoice processing services and software might save your team time up-front, an inaccurately processed invoice is, in fact, more harmful to your bottom line than a slow one, even if that error is rectified. According to a study of AP Processes for organizations in the Nordics, undetected invoice errors represented ⅓ of invoice posting costs. In contrast, even detected errors delayed payments by as much as 31 additional days resulting in late-payment penalties and missed early-payment discount opportunities.
What’s the Solution?
The most effective approach is a hybrid one. KeyMark created CloudCapture to combine the speed of Capture technology with the intuition and problem-solving capabilities of real humans. By wielding automation tech to process data, and hand-verifying sources of possible tech failures with human eyes, KeyMark helps you achieve both speed and accuracy. What’s better, CloudCapture is a Business Process Outsourcing service, meaning we’ll handle all that processing and manual verification for you, freeing your teams for work that further drives success.
Invoice Processing by Industry
With over two and half decades of experience, KeyMark has worked in just about every vertical, from transportation and logistics, to manufacturing, government, financial services, distribution, utilities, aviation, and beyond – streamlining back-office objectives for operations/shared services, accounts payable, and accounts receivable.
Through all this experience, we’ve encountered a list of frequent process offenders that our CloudCapture BPO service specializes in solving. These include:
- Bill of lading
- PO/Non-PO Invoices
- Credit Memos
- Purchase orders
- Freight Invoices
- Remittance & Payments