7 Advantages of Automated Invoice Processing

The Challenge of Invoice Processing

Invoice processing is a complex, time-intensive task that challenges organizations with high volumes of paperwork, lengthy approval cycles, and frequent manual errors. Traditional methods rely heavily on repetitive manual tasks, which slow down payment cycles, complicate record-keeping, and increase the risk of missed payments or inaccuracies that impact financial reporting. Without efficient processing, finance teams struggle to maintain accuracy and timeliness, which can strain vendor relationships and lead to financial discrepancies.

In addition to slowing down operations, manual invoice processing limits visibility into spending, making it difficult for companies to track expenditures and ensure financial compliance. Teams often lack a clear overview of invoices awaiting approval or payment status, which results in reactive rather than proactive management. This lack of transparency can cause bottlenecks and reduce the finance team’s ability to focus on higher-value tasks that drive the organization’s financial success.

Before Automated Invoice Processing

You are working with AP, AR, capital accounting, general accounting, bank reporting and many other routine tasks. The vast majority of your time is spent focused on AP, either directly or indirectly.

• Lack of Information and Long Processing Times: With AP consisting of paper and filing cabinets, it’s difficult to have the information you need to perform these tasks accurately. Invoice processing times are lengthy and you have no visibility into amounts until they are posted to the GL.
• Repetitive Manual Tasks: Each invoice that is matched to a PO or goods receipt still needs to be touched at least 4 times and filed in 2 different places before it is posted to the GL. The invoice is touched and filed yet again when payment is made.
• Long Exception Resolve Rates: When exceptions come along, there’s no limit to the time it could take to get the exception resolved and posted. If there is an issue that brings process problems to light you investigate and adjust the current business process in order to avoid the same issue again in the future. This means there are “patches upon patches”, because users and vendors keep finding ways to avoid policy, either accidentally – or on purpose!
• Lack of Transparency: Sometimes the result of an issue is very unexpected. You might discover that one vendor is using you to suit their cash flow needs by delivering goods that you didn’t need or use, or simply because you don’t use POs for that vendor – you’re just paying for anything that they deliver.

You are the person that has to deal with “fire drills” when a vendor puts your company on credit hold. You stop what you are working on, gather the facts of the situation, find out exactly where the paper invoice in question is, and communicate where the failure was with both the vendor and the department/location that was impacted by the credit hold.

• Credit Hold: One problem with these situations is that you don’t have any insight on how long an invoice was out for approvals before it came back to AP for entry and payment. Because of this, it often looks like AP was the bottleneck that caused the credit hold.
• Taking Advantage of: If a vendor knows your process isn’t perfect, they can take advantage of that — and put you on credit holds earlier than if they had confidence in what you were doing.
• Lacking Data and Information: Month end close is just a fact of life that needs to be endured. You can only put so many manual tasks in place and still have confidence that you have accommodated all possible scenarios, just to learn that you haven’t. Often the data that is collected is a series of inconsistent reports and spreadsheets.
• Extra Manual Work: This leaves you to perform a lot of behind -the-scenes analysis before releasing the data up the food chain to the controllers and the CFO. If you had data that was the ‘single version of the truth’ you could eliminate much of the manual oversight that only you are qualified to perform.

After Automated Invoice Processing

Once you have implemented automated invoice processing, we guarantee that you will both see and feel the difference. Here is why we believe that you as an account manager will love automated invoice processing:

1. You have visibility and self-service reporting from all of the plants. You are no longer dependent on spreadsheets.
2. You’re not searching through file cabinets.
3. AP staff gain time from not having to file, un-file and re-file at each step.
4. You gain the confidence of management and your vendors. Month end activities and report gathering is coming from a place where all of the data is accurate and exportable. The process has removed non value added manual tasks.
5. You have visibility into both the transaction status and history, so that if a credit hold situation occurs you immediately have access to the problem.
6. You have metrics available to watch the productivity of the AP department. This allows you to have confidence in your team and to address areas of improvement when you see the need.
7. You are no longer the person that has to do other tasks that fall into the gap called ‘someone has to figure it out’ before the information can be used.

Automate Invoice Entry and Processing with Rillion

Rillion offers a powerful solution for automated invoice entry and processing that streamlines the entire invoice workflow, significantly reducing the need for manual intervention and human error. Here’s how Rillion helps automate your accounts payable process:
Automated Data Capture: Rillion’s solution utilizes Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and AI to automatically capture and digitize invoice data from various formats, including paper, PDF, XML, and more. This eliminates manual data entry and ensures a high level of accuracy, improving efficiency from the start.

• PO Matching and Exception Handling: Rillion automates the process of matching invoices with purchase orders (POs) and goods receipts. With its intelligent “cascading” matching system, invoices are matched at both the header and line item levels, even for complex scenarios where multiple POs or invoices are involved. Exceptions are flagged automatically and routed to the right approvers, speeding up resolution times.
• Approval Workflows: Once invoices are captured, Rillion automatically routes them through digital approval workflows, customized based on your business rules. Approvers can review and approve invoices from anywhere, on any device, with just one click, drastically reducing the approval cycle time.
• Seamless ERP Integration: Rillion integrates smoothly with over 50 popular ERP systems, including NetSuite, SAP, and Sage Intacct, ensuring that the invoice data flows effortlessly between your AP system and your ERP.
• AI-Assisted Coding: Rillion’s AI engine helps automate the coding of cost invoices, learning from past invoices to improve coding accuracy over time, reducing the need for manual input.