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Invoice template
Putting Structure to the Unstructurable
By accelerating invoice processing through automation, organizations can realize immediate benefits and a return on investment in the form of discounts for early payments - typically, 2% for invoices paid within ten days - and in the elimination of penalties for invoices paid late. Automation can also benefit organizations by reducing the amount of manual intervention typically required to process invoices, which reduces errors and enables users to employ skilled A/P staff in other areas requiring their hands-on expertise.
Leading forms processing software vendors continue to position their solutions for the processing of unstructured forms. Notably, systems are again being prominently promoted to handle invoices.
Over the past several years, a number of such applications were introduced and met stiff resistance from both customers and the invoices themselves. Nonetheless, software developers are actively seeking to address these issues. The reason is simple - invoice processing is one of the most labor-intensive tasks for large organizations. Payables clerks are well paid, highly skilled employees who spend a large amount of time doing routine tasks. A recent study by the Institute of Management and Administration revealed that invoice processing costs have risen 37% in the past four years. This continues to be an area ripe for automation.
One of the great challenges to invoice processing is the endless variations in the format of these bills. Attempts to automate invoice processing led to the creation of libraries of form templates, each representing the different invoices the system encountered. Unfortunately, these libraries quickly become overwhelmed, as each new billing vendor, or any variation of an invoice requires a new template.
The latest generation of invoice process automation tools forgoes the template methodology and relies instead on sophisticated recognition systems that distinguish keywords such as "Amount Due" to process relevant fields regardless of their location on the form. When used effectively, these systems can dramatically reduce the manual intervention required to process invoices. This can speed invoice processing, allowing companies to take advantage of early payment discounts, reduce the cost of late payments, and best of all, re-assign their A/P staff to higher-value activities.
In addition to automating the payables function, these autoclassification software systems can output the data from forms to a variety of accounting and enterprise resource planning systems. By capturing and indexing invoice data on the fly, it can be exported into existing workflow systems.
Captiva Software has recently introduced InputAccel for Invoices, an automated invoice processing solution built on the company's document capture solution, InputAccel and the forms processing solution FormWare. It employs forms processing and intelligent document recognition technologies to capture data such as the invoice number and date, the vendor, the purchase order number, the account number and the total amount.
InputAccel for Invoices reduces the manual intervention typically required to process invoices by transforming a paper invoice into a digital image from which invoice data is automatically extracted, validated and delivered. It can export the results into an image repository or enterprise content management (ECM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), accounts payable (A/P) or other back-end system.
"Processing semi-structured forms such as invoices has posed a problem for organizations, as it typically requires components of both document capture and forms processing," said Jim Vickers, Captiva's chief marketing officer. Vickers said that Captiva is the only company with an established heritage in both document capture and forms processing. "Using the best components of both InputAccel and FormWare has enabled us to deliver an invoice processing solution unlike any other offering on the market today," he said.
Automating invoice processing is a logical step for any company that desires to speed workflow, reduce costs and improve the accuracy of financial reporting statements as mandated by regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley.
"What we've seen is that less people must process more work in an environment where per-page processing costs are sky-rocketing," added Vickers. "Although electronic invoicing is progressing in some sectors, most businesses are seeing paper invoices continue to flood their enterprise. To stay competitive, companies must eliminate the burdens of traditional invoice processing and automate the practice, which has been shown to deliver significant savings both within the A/P department and throughout the organization."
Both Captiva Software and ReadSoft have reintroduced invoice processing products based on lessons learned from their previous products. ReadSoft's INVOICES, the predecessor to ReadSoft DOCUMENTS for Invoices, was first available almost a decade ago. Captiva, which had previously released its "InvoicePack" software, replaced that application with the totally new InputAccel for Invoices.
ReadSoft's new product, DOCUMENTS for Invoices, automates the steps of processing invoice documents.
Several of these systems to integrate with large document management and workflow systems. ReadSoft DOCUMENTS for Invoices can be expanded to include an approval workflow and our EDI business solution.
Each of the forms processing vendors also offer automation tools for handling structured forms, which have historically been much easier to process. However, the latest version of AnyDoc Software's OCR for AnyDoc software blurs the distinction between structured and unstructured forms processing. With the product's "QuickApp Technology," there is no need to create a pre-defined template for every possible variation of a type of form, document or invoice that may be occasionally processed.
Data fields are identified and business rules applied with a simple point and click of the mouse to automatically capture data. OCR for AnyDoc with QuickApp allows the user to create on-the-fly profiles while processing new documents for the first time and save the profiles for future use.
Each profile created is saved and can be quickly selected if other examples of the form, document or invoice are again encountered. This minimizes the manual time and effort required to process miscellaneous documents which are often the bulk of manual data entry time.
AnyDoc Software has defined four processing methods: Structured (using templates), Unstructured (AnyApp), Key-from-lmage, and the new QuickApp profile.
"We can proudly say, OCR for AnyDoc is the only product processing any document that exists with one of these four primary processing methods," said AnyDoc Software President, Charles W. Jackson.
"OCR for AnyDoc software provides businesses the ability to fully automate the data entry process of any document in their organization and allows them to virtually eliminate manual data entry, speed productivity levels with minimally trained verify operators, increase data accuracy and save hundreds of thousands of dollars in wasted errors and labor costs."
Similarly, INDICIUS software from Neurascript allows documents of any type and layout, structured or unstructured, to be handled automatically. This gives organizations the ability to automate the processing of their paper-based information as early on as in the mailroom.
Neurascript's Free-form Technology can perform data analysis and extraction using a combination of rules and probabilistic techniques. Free-form Technology has the ability to understand the format and context of data to be captured, thereby locating it dynamically on each document without the need for a template.
INDICIUS for Invoices has been installed at Douwe Egberts, one of the largest coffee roasters in the world, automatically processing over 5,000 invoices each month. Douwe Egberts are using INDICUS for Invoices to capture and extract all header information including supplier, invoice date, number, and monetary amounts ready for Douwe Egberts to export into their financial management system.
The ability of a document processing system to distinguish between an invoice and other document, allows great promise productivity improvement as documents can be processed with minimal sorting. According to a white paper by SWT on the topic, "Processing Invoices Automatically," automatic classification enables operators to scan all supplier invoices together without the need for prior manual sorting. "Reading of item rows is an important function for companies that want to feed their ERP or accounting software with precise and accurate data," the report states. "Full-Text recognition technology is used by default to extract data from new supplier invoices or when the small number of invoices for a supplier makes the creation of an automatic template unnecessary."
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