Today, many organizations are still burdened with manually inputting data from paper documents or correcting errors from electronic capture methods into their systems – a time-consuming, error-prone process.
Accounts Payable (AP) teams play a huge role in keeping a business running by making payments and ensuring that all outstanding balances are paid so that the flow of goods and services into the business are not affected. These teams also help free up funds and prevent payment delays, and late fees, by chasing outstanding retrospective Purchase Orders or Goods Receipt Notes to allow for automated 2/3-way matching, as required by the finance system.
As we hit more challenging economic times, more organizations will be looking at financial ratios to help run and make decision for their business. Days payable outstanding (DPO) is a ratio that indicates the average time (in days) that a company takes to pay its invoices to its creditors. The ratio is often calculated on an annual or quarterly basis, and it is an indicator of how well the company is managing its cash outflows. A high DPO can indicate that the company is using its capital resourcefully, but it can also show that the company is struggling to pay its creditors.
We know that processing large volumes of invoices is resource heavy, time consuming and can delay the payment cycle - this can have a knock-on effect your Days Payable Outstanding ratio.
Automating your document processing can help improve your DPO and save you time and money. However, overhauling long-established operational practices can be difficult and expensive. Is it worth making the change and how much time are you wasting by correcting incorrect or manually inputting data?
The real cost of invoice processing
The average AP clerk can process five invoices an hour – that includes data entry, checking and correcting any mistakes, and processing the invoice. After that, more time is needed for posting, validation, disputes, making payments, and eventually archiving the invoice. All this document handling can lead to a significant amount of lost time in your business, resulting in a higher cost per invoice – on average around $10.95 (see the graph below, Ardent Partners 2021).
Whether you’re processing hundreds or hundreds of thousands of invoices, the problem remains the same: it takes a long time to manually process multiple inbound documents in different formats with different data capture requirements. You have to build and maintain a large team to handle the workload – a heavy burden that means your business can only scale up when you can afford to hire additional staff.
Even if you have capture technology in place, your team are potentially working with bad data, they must correct mistakes and apply logic to process an invoice. Wouldn’t it be great to model that logic and run it through a set of rules that provides you with 100% accurate data?
With the right technology, you can process more invoices, faster, applying the logic you need – keeping your operational costs down while freeing up your key staff to focus on their core business.
Realize your business’ potential with automation
Our Advanced Data Automation solution provides straight-through, no-touch document processing. It captures, extracts and validates data from email invoices with 100% accuracy, before automatically inputting it into your financial software – a process that takes a matter of minutes.
We estimate that our system speeds up invoice processing by between 60% and 75%. This saved time can boost your profit margins: our top-performing clients have achieved a processing cost of $2.20 (£1.82) per invoice, an 80% saving on the average processing cost. 
Get quick speed-to-value
It won’t take long to start seeing results: Advanced Data Automation doesn’t require a high level of changes to your IT system, making it quick to implement for companies of all sizes.
Use data you can trust
Because Advanced Data Automation extracts data straight from the data layer of a PDF, rather than the image, it doesn’t make character recognition mistakes. You’re guaranteed 100% data accuracy, every time.
Improve trading relationships
Your vendors won’t have to change their infrastructure, applications or processes. They can continue to use the tools they use every day, without disruption – which is why our system has high vendor adoption rates and fast onboarding.
Rely on a trusted service
Advanced Data Automation processes business documents 24 hours a day, 365 days per year. Today, our solution manages over 1 million documents a month from over 50 technology partners, around 750 customers and over 50,000 unique senders. And that number is growing – every month.
Advanced Data Automation can:
- Automatically process a range of financial documents and files
- Guarantee 100% data accuracy, without human intervention
- Apply complex rules to correct and substitute data for input to your finance system
- Perform 2/3 way matching before the invoice hits your finance system
- Speed up invoice processing, process within minutes of receipt, and enable timely payments
- Enhance order visibility and data insights
- Scale up as your business requires and increase productivity
- Reduce operating costs
- Deliver better service to improve vendor satisfaction
- Lower environmental impact
Talk to Advanced
Could switching to electronic invoicing benefit your business? Ask yourself the following questions:
- What is your existing invoicing process?
- Is your existing capture method working well?
- How often do your staff touch inbound invoices?
- How long does it take to process one document?
- How much does document processing cost your business?
- Do you employ temporary staff to input data or correct errors?
- Is your data accurate after capture?
- Are you meeting your service level agreements for your vendors?
- What efficiencies can you gain by automating your invoice processing?
To discover how Advanced Data Automation can help you achieve your goals, get in touch today at oneadvanced.com/en-us/contact-us