Will RPA Replace OCR & Advanced Capture for AP Invoice Processing?

Robotic process automation (RPA) seems to be in the news daily for what can be done with web and process robots, and how this technology streamlines manual, tedious, error-prone tasks.

Considering that invoice processing in accounts payable is about as manual, tedious and error-prone as it gets, is RPA a good fit for automation? Will RPA replace advanced capture and unstructured forms processing that has been used to automate invoice processing with line-item extraction and database look-ups for years, but which is complex, costly and largely avoided by small and mid-sized businesses?

Read on to learn what the future may hold for RPA and advanced capture for invoice processing.

Electronic Invoices

If you’re like most businesses, and receive the majority of your invoices via PDFs emailed to your AP department, RPA can be an excellent solution. Invoice PDFs are machine readable and an ideal scenario for process robots. Invoices can pass through cognitive RPA (OCR-optical character recognition) and be matched to both purchase order and proof of delivery – without the cost and complexity of older technology.

Paper Invoices

Simply put, RPA can’t do anything with paper invoices unless you have actual robots scanning them…

While a minority of those received today, paper invoices still need to be scanned and OCR is the ideal technology to automatically extract and route information for processing. Advanced capture takes it a step further by eliminating the vast majority of data entry by automatically extracting information from any invoice, without having to set up OCR templates, including line item extracting and matching information with purchase orders as well as proofs of delivery. Advanced capture then routes invoice information for approval, and for exceptions to be investigated and resolved, and then for payments to be made.

A Hybrid Solution

If you receive both paper and electronic invoices, you can continue to manually process the paper while using RPA to automate the electronic processing. Later, you could use advanced capture to handle the paper if the cost justification is there.

To help you determine if RPA and/or advanced capture is a good fit for you, and to identify which vendor solution, talk to us. We’ve implemented a variety of technology to automate invoice processing since 1994. RPA vendors and resellers without any invoice processing automation experience may fall short of delivering what you need to cut processing times by over 90%, give you enhanced visibility into your liabilities and cash flow, and to prevent duplicate payments and other problems that can strain your relationship with vendors. We can also help you avoid RPA solutions that require hardware, additional SQL licenses and other hidden costs to support the expansion of robots and the computing power they require.