How accounts payable turned a  profit

As a leading alcobev company, their paper based finance department was manually extracting, verifying and processing invoices from over 200 vendors. Huge backlogs and lengthy Accounts Payable (AP) processes was adding more pressure on the team, delaying payments and creating unhappy experiences with suppliers. Over 50% of the team’s valuable time and talent was being spent in clerical, mundane tasks; essentially a waste due to inefficiencies and costly manual processes. Invoices were received on email or by post, piled up at the AP desk, sorted, verified, and punched into the system. The backlog just kept mounting with some payments being delayed by weeks. Not 

The Intelligent Document Processing solution was implemented after a deep understanding of the existing processes. From tracking the various sources including email and physical mailed invoices being received. The complete verification process followed with supporting documents like the PO and receipt. Data entry into their account ERP, and finally a second round of verification to catch the manual entry errors.  

The IDP solution was implemented to streamline five primary AP automation tasks:

1. Capture: Identified the invoice from the source (email or scan) along with the vendor based on the primary data extraction from the format.
2. Extract: Intelligently extracted key data, from the invoice number to item pricing details.
3. Process: Cleaned up and tagged data based on complex algorithms that gave a high level of accuracy (and further increased with human input).
4. Population: Pushed the data to a CSV format that was supported and could be easily uploaded to their ERP.
5. Verification: A three way verification and report which highlighted potential errors based on an accuracy score. Adding Human-in-the-loop (HITL) at this stage allowed us to increase data accuracy over time.

After processing tens of thousands of invoices over a period of 6 months both internal and external benefits become evident:

• Freed up AP team’s time to focus on higher value accounting work for better productivity.
• Invoice processing and validation completed within a 2 day average.
• Faster payments to vendors with better price negotiations based on shorter payment cycles and payment terms.
• Less amount of time spent in follow up and pressure from vendors, purchase team, and sales team.

Time and money saving across multiple departments and purchase helped them achieve a 9 month ROI