Honest answer: How often have you had to tear up a check or cancel a transaction on your mobile banking app because you misspelled the payee, botched the amount due or got the date wrong? If you’re the average human, chances are the answer is plenty of times. Now multiple this amount by dozens, hundreds, or even thousands.
What’s often just a nuisance for consumers paying their bills becomes a real and costly headache for organizations dealing with a large task load of invoices each month. The good news is companies have an easy solution for this recurring problem.
Automated invoice processing ensures that every incoming new invoice is captured and validated properly and quickly, tying up as little human labor as possible and not holding up any processes. By removing most (if not all) the manual steps, the entire accounting process is faster than ever and still lets you catch almost all mistakes and fraud attempts.
If you haven’t embarked on digital transformation for the invoice and payment process, now is a good time to start thinking about company needs and how your business can futureproof its invoice processing for 2022. As the sudden pandemic time has proven, external disruptions can seriously affect the purchase-to-pay workflow process and hamper the ability to process a customers’ invoice on time and/or get paid by your partners.
When we surveyed more than 1,000 finance and Accounts Payable leaders, almost two-thirds told us delayed invoice validation was the top reason for late payments. Late payments mean late fees and charges, and these hit the bottom line one invoice after another. Streamlining the accounts payable invoice processing steps can significantly reduce these delays, ensuring timely payments and avoiding unnecessary costs
This is just one example why adopting an intelligent and secure technology-based invoice validation process has so many benefits. When it comes to automated invoice processing, a cloud-based platform such as Yooz offers any size business unmatched savings, speed, and security. When you consider an average company handling a few hundred invoices every month, that's a scale at which automated processing will almost instantly slash costs, cycle time, and stop the time-consuming battle with exceptions.
Automated invoice processing takes the guesswork away, using three-way matching for the invoice validation process as soon as the invoice starts the workflow process. Consider that first, the automation platform captures the vendor’s invoice and extracts every relevant bit of information: purchase order (PO) number, issue date, due date, service/product provided, amount, bank, and tax information.
This capture requires only seconds thanks to machine-learning algorithms that get smarter with each invoice they read. In fact, the powerful Yooz invoice and payment process automation platform has processed more than 100 million invoices from more than a million vendors so far, so there are few formats that can stump the system.
Once captured, the next step is matching. The platform automatically performs multiple checks across various documents to make sure the invoice is neither incorrect nor fraudulent. This process is called three-way matching because the system compares information from three sources: the actual vendor invoice, the corresponding purchase order, and the receiving report. The software ensures that all is in order by looking at details in the invoice and in the additional documents such as quantities, price per unit, terms, and pertinent financial information.
There are plenty of reasons why an invoice can be flagged. For example, an impatient vendor may submit an overdue invoice twice and change the invoice number. Maybe the supplier switched bank accounts but forgot to notify you. Or perhaps he didn’t, and instead someone is trying to impersonate the supplier to siphon off the payable amount due.
The rate of such fraud attacks rose during the pandemic as working from home disrupted many AP processes and forced dispersed teams or skeleton staff to complete invoice processing remotely. With an automated, intelligent validation process, you drastically reduce exposure to fraud and errors.
Only when the software has determined that all details match and are correct will the system automatically route the invoice to the right recipient for final review and approval. Implementing a paperless invoice approval system further streamlines this process, reducing manual intervention and speeding up the overall workflow
With all of the new regulations in place as a result of Making Tax Digital and e-invoicing regulations, having an up-front invoice validation process ensures compliance. A cloud-based automation platform safely stores all of the extracted information yet is accessible from anywhere at any time with a few simple keystrokes on a customized dashboard just like searching through any website. Whether for audit reporting, multi-year storage, or taxes, there is always an electronic record and digital trail in place.
So, what to do? Simply put, by partnering Yooz you can win the AP matching game and stamp out errors and fraud in your invoice and payment processing workflow.