Invoice processing on a manual basis can not only be time-consuming for employees but costly in a number of ways. Financial penalties for non-compliance can be unnecessarily accrued without proper planning and systems. In the UK, statutory interest must be charged on late commercial payments, which is typically 8% plus the Bank of England base rate for business-to-business transactions.
There’s also the Better Payment Practice Code, a voluntary framework followed by numerous businesses that maintain that 95% of invoices received must be paid within 30 days. In the US, many organizations are incentivized to complete invoicing processing early due to the discounts they can gain from vendors. Manual processing is frequently too slow to enable these benefits.
A clear and obvious solution to these challenges is hiring more people to clear the invoice workload. However, more than two-thirds (68%) of modern-day businesses struggle to hire the digital workers they need, with 45% blaming the shortage of qualified applicants. With a shallow talent pool proving to be a blocker and people usually proving to be a company’s biggest expense, technology adoption is the cost-effective method to achieving efficiency.
The Benefits of Intelligent Document Processing (IDP)
More businesses are turning to robotic process automation (RPA) to take care of invoice processing without any human intervention. A key element of RPA, intelligent document processing (IDP), makes use of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and natural language processing to extract the needed data, whether it’s from PDFs, emails, images, scans, or even handwriting. The key benefits of IDP include:
- Cost cutting from not having to process large volumes of data manually
- Fast set-up times
- AI enables immediate increases in accuracy
- Workers save time by avoiding manual processing
- Businesses can focus on maintaining strong levels of customer experience
A Wide Range of Use Cases
For any accounts payable team, extracting relevant information from a high volume of paper documents in varying formats is undoubtedly both costly and inefficient, and IDP removes the burden from these individuals. However, to say that this is the only use case for IDP would be doing the technology a disservice.
The healthcare sector can utilize IDP to access medical history in a structured and easy-to-digest manner, helping to inform patient care. In the banking sector, it can shine by extracting information from bank forms such as deposits, savings, or current accounts to help deliver a reliable, convenient, and prompt experience to customers. It can even make a difference in loan applications. This process can be lengthy and therefore frustrating for customers. Loan origination can eradicate any lengthy communications between loan officer and applicant.
In the oil and gas industry, IDP can extract key information from documents delivered by drilling operators, lease, and mineral rights holders to combine key messages into one smooth channel. Over in the legal sector, professionals can access relevant information from auditing files, mergers and acquisitions files, and property filings. In the construction industry, engineers can draw out critical information from engineering drawings and feed the relevant data into downstream planning systems.
IDP presents numerous possibilities. It can not only be applied to a plethora of different industries but handles tasks that organizations don’t have the human resource in place to complete. However, any implementation project requires underpinned expertise to ensure it can provide full value.
