Invoice Management With RPA -Robotic Process Automation

 

Invoice management is a function performed within the organization related to appropriation and is accountable to process invoice process of the transactions between trader and distributor. As all other finance processes, invoice management has officially become a challenge to the organizations. The managing department is not able to overcome this issue as the high number of invoices has to be processed regularly from the raw information which is different formats.

- The invoice process management also is known as Process Definition Document in RPA technology, which signifies the automation process of capturing the flow of a business process with a high level of precision.

Traditional Invoice Processing Technique

- The traditional invoice management process required significant human resources like a 5 members team and a lead which also faced a lot of challenges.  

- If taking a case study of traditional invoice processing the total number of invoices handled yearly is 1,00,000 by 5 employees of the Accounting team, which divides as 20,000 invoices are handled by each employee per year. As each employee works for 220 days average per year, which means an employee handles 100 invoices per day, which expresses each employee works for 8 hours a day and each invoice takes 5 mins to process.

- Whereas Robotic Process Automation offers attractive benefits and ROI for the financial services industry, particularly in automating back-office operations, such as automation and invoice processing. And Robotic Process automation is making an impact with a big margin providing touchless business process automation to back-office accounting or Data entry jobs reducing human resources, cost, the human error, also providing higher "Return Of Investment " in business. Financial Accounting and invoice processing is a significant part of the entire business as back-office jobs. Organizations keep all the tracks over the transactions between the vendor and supplier. 

Challenges In Traditional Invoice Management

- Human error is a big challenge in this traditional process of managing invoices as it requires excess communication, manual data entry.  

- Delay in uploading the invoice manually is also an issue as it cost a lot of time. 

- Managing a team regarding different operations and tasks requires a professional experienced lead, which can be cost-effective to a business as it requires additional management efforts. 

- Branching out SLA - (Service Level Agreement) has a list issue halting the process such as uptime and downtime availability, support hours, response and repair times, SLA Credits, termination rights.

- Employee scalability is a sensitive matter as it requires monitoring and managing over performance and reliability, cost pressures, application footprint, identify access management, etc.

- Business owners and organizations can't expect to know some of the things like natural disasters earthquake, flood and hurricanes, tornadoes, virus pandemic (COVD-19) which effects directly to the economic loss following an incident. 

Invoice Processing Bots | SAAS Subscription | RPA | AI | Digitalisation

RPA In Finance Accounting

- Robotic process automation (RPA) is rapidly changing the accounting and finance operations, arguably faster than any other piece of modern technology.

- 34% of Financial organization relies on the manual process, 47% Accounting Professional consider manual data entry & inefficient process as their biggest challenge. 

- Implementing RPA in Invoice Processing can bring out spectacular results. Sterling Commerce reports that fully automated invoice processing can reduce per-invoice costs by nearly 90% while reducing errors by nearly 40%.

How Robotic Process Automation - RPA Works In Invoice Management

- RPA can generally be applied to any process as 

• Decisions allowed to floe dynamically alternative, Based on rules
• The same step performed in a looping state, Consistent
• Template oriented data gathered and insertion in a repetitive manner

 In general Robotic Process Automation Softwareslooks to automate the following tasks mostly working on

1. scanning for new invoices
2. seize the available invoices
3. Evaluating the available invoices

RPA Software working Procedure

- RPA robots regularly scan over the allocated folder for new invoices

- After it finds the file RPA robot collect it for Data extraction

- RPA robot reads and extracts information from the invoices using Optical Character Recognition(OCR) and Natural Language Processing(NLP)

- Then the robot reads the specific fields in the invoices that need to be updated in the ERP.

- Next step is verifying the invoice details like company code, suppliers number, VAT from the database.

- RPA robot opens up the ERP key in all the fields that need to be filled, based on the companies utilization.

Benefits of using RPA in Invoice Management

RPA implementation in typical manual work like invoice processing, it can be a lifesaver. Most business decisions are driven by money one way or another. And automating your more monotonous processes is a great way to save money on labor and costly data errors. 

• Elimination of paper costs:- No more paper gathering, Storage usage. No more stockpiling of old documents. While searching for old records can be troublesome.
• Improves Accuracy:- Invoices are cross-matched to POs and shipping documents. information is always up-to-date and added automatically. Without requiring data entry across systems, human error is insignificantly reduced.
• Exceptional Productivity:-  With implementing automation it not just helps in accounting, but also management in micromanaging invoicing tasks, handling high-level tasks that support enterprise goals.
• Reliability and Enhanced Experience:-   RPA automation makes the service available for 24 x 7 365 days a year. By implementing RPa business organizations can now deliver enhanced services achieving an advantage in the industry and actively scaling their operations. 
• Reduce Fraud Risk:- Fraudulent is reduced in a big margin as invoice and check exposure with build-in verification.
• Compliance and Audit Trails:- RPA can be programmed to encounter all compliance standards. Enabling the availability of fully maintained logs, and every step undertaken in a specific process is recorded for historical audits.
• Return Of Investment:-  Deploying RPA automation companies can anticipate seeing the full ROI realization.