Many business processes, including accounts payable, can benefit from intelligent document processing. Every company has accounts payable, and processing invoices takes time and money. Although automation has made a significant difference compared to the past few years, advancements have ground to a halt. However, Intelligent document processing (IDP) technology tries to constantly remove the main advancement barrier to quicker and less expensive accounts payables processing.
Introduction to IDP and Accounting Payable
In the overview of IDP, AIxOutlook defined IDP as “Intelligent Document Processing is a smart solution that assimilates human understanding of data and technological accuracy. It is the part of intelligent process automation that utilizes OCR, AI, NLP, and Machine Learning to process large volumes of data and documentation by extracting, recognizing, and classifying data from a wide range of formats.”
Accounts payable refers to a department within an accounting firm, though it could also refer to the way that orders are processed in general. Organizations use various tools and technologies to achieve higher levels of accuracy in the way they process orders. While many companies have improved the speed of this workflow process over the years, large firms have generally failed to include the benefits that accrue from a high level of accuracy. Companies that have tried to include the financial benefits from increased accuracy in accounts payable, such as by employing barcode scanners or proprietary software programs, are finding that many of these technology advances do not scale up very well.
On the other hand, intelligent document processing (IDP) technology achieves high levels of accuracy at a low cost and provides the high level of accuracy needed to run modern, highly automated manufacturing operations. Hence, organizations are more willing to integrate IDP technology to enhance accuracy, real-time validation, and data integrity at every stage of the process. In addition to these early uses of IDP technology, the advancement of automation technologies has allowed smaller firms to use more advanced accounting and business automation tools.
An Intelligent Document Processing Approach for Accounts Payable
A competitive advantage for accounts payable can be derived from intelligent document processing. Intelligent document processing systems can identify, extract, and convert data from any document into a structured format, including images of paper documents, PDFs, or text in emails. Therefore, it implements accounts payable automation products to match the invoice with purchase orders and receiving documents, route the invoice for approval, and place it in a ready-to-pay queue. Accounts payable is a labor-intensive process requiring a significant amount of data entry and verification. This represents a potential source of error. Intelligent document processing, however, automates this step for 88 percent or more of the incoming unstructured invoices.
As intelligent document processing extracts data from unstructured and semi-structured invoice documents as well as it speeds up invoice processing and reduces invoice processing costs and their associated timelines. For a long time, automated workflows and matching have been available, but manual data entry is still necessary for a lot of invoice data. IDP removes this challenge. IDP can capture invoice data in just under one minute, as opposed to the several minutes it takes rules-based software to capture it. The accuracy of manual data entry might be good, but the accuracy of intelligent document processing is far superior. IDP’s machine learning approach increases accuracy and speed over time.
IDP Provides a Level of Accuracy with Automation
IDP refers to an array of automation solutions that can collect, extract, and organize information from a variety of sources, such as printed text, images, and even handwriting. Automating this process can be done by multiple software and the results can be integrated into a workflow for complete end-to-end automation. IDP drastically reduces accounts payable professionals’ workloads, and it is able to digitize and contextualize a great deal of the data that RPA cannot comprehend, thus enabling more end-to-end automation of entire processes. Intelligent document processing (IDP) technology achieves high levels of accuracy at a low cost and provides the high level of accuracy needed to run modern, highly automated manufacturing operations. Hence, organizations are more willing to integrate IDP technology to enhance accuracy, real-time validation, and data integrity at every stage of the process. In addition to these early uses of IDP technology, the advancement of automation technologies has allowed smaller firms to use more advanced accounting and business automation tools.
IDP offers a productive system
Even when an organization has an automation system, most teams spend hours manually reviewing invoices. The implementation of an IDP technology in a business process can greatly reduce the manual work involved in collecting, converting, sorting, responding to, or routing data, and instead streamline it into an easy-to-do process. So, their team can concentrate on tasks that are more important or critical.
