Automation of the Invoice Capture and Approval Process

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Automation of the Invoice Capture and Approval
Process
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Invoice Approval Process Automation

• Bonjour et bienvenue
• Good afternoon and welcome
• To the FMI
• Invoice Approval Process Automation Session
• John Kay Connectis Group
• Sheldon Mackarenko Captaris
• Mario Mastandrea Captaris

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Automation of the Invoice Approval Process

• Should you consider Invoice Approval Automation?

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Would you like to

• Handle incoming invoices once and then file them
  for offsite storage or recycling?
• Know that all invoices received each day are
  entered into the system in a timely manner?
• Reduce the manual process of keying invoice data
  into your system while increasing the accuracy of
  that data?

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Would you like to

• Know the total value of invoices received
  anywhere in you organization by the end of
  business day?
• Automatically match invoices with their
  corresponding Purchase Orders within moments of
  the invoices entering the system?
• Know where an invoice is in the approval process
  and to be able to provide management or the
  supplier accurate information immediately when
  they inquire?

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Would you like to

• Know that all business rules associated that the
  approval process are being adhered to and be
  notified when they are not?
• Know that all accounting codes and electronic
  signatures have been applied before the invoice
  is presented for payment?
• Approve all invoices in a timely manner and avoid
  late payment fees?
• Have the invoice data, the audit data and the
  invoice image ready for your Document Management
  system at the conclusion of the approval process?

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Answer

• If the Answer to most or all of these questions
  is
• YES!
• Then you should consider
• Automation of the Invoice Approval Process
• using
• state-of-theart Technologies and proven
  Methodologies

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Data Capture

• At Connectis Group we have over 20 years
  experience in Document Process Solutions and in
  the Data Capture market we represent the three
  leading technologies
• Cardiff TeleForm
• Kofax Ascent
• ABBYY FlexiCapture

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The Capture Process

• Invoice Image and Data Capture

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Set-up Stage

• Before Invoices can be Captured, Forms Templates
  must be created and processing rules defined.
• With FlexiCapture 8.0 Professional ABBYY provides
  powerful, easy to use tools to make the
  preparation of a FlexiCapture system simple
• FormsDesigner
• FlexiLayout Studio
• Document Template Editor
• Project Creator

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Invoice Capture
Regional office
Inv_at_dept.gov.ca
Email Server
RightFax Fax Server
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Processing Stage

• Image Pre-Processing
• Page Orientation
• De-skewing
• De-speckling
• Classification
• Intelligent Document Recognition
• Is this an invoice
• Is it single or multiple pages
• Match to Document Template
• Do we know this company

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Processing Stage

• Recognition - Data Extraction
• Optical Character Recognition
• Intelligent Character Recognition
• Bar Code Recognition
• Apply rules
• Date normalization
• Arithmetic functions
• Dictionary look up
• Database look up
• Verification/Correction
• Group Verification
• Field Verification
• Document Verification
• Data and Image Export
• Data and Image exported to ODBC compatible
  Database and/or Document Repository

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Customer Story

• Customer Story
• Trendset

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Trendset

• Trendset provides advanced freight accounting and
  payment services to its clients
• Trendset processes in excess of 12,500,000
  invoices per year
• Approximately 80 via EDI
• Remaining 2,600,000 are paper invoices
• Paper invoices took 80 of the effort

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Trendset - Their Objective

• Reduce the need to pre-sort invoices by client
• Eliminate the need to file separator sheets
  between invoices
• Reduce manual effort required to capture data
  from Invoices
• Reduce the time required to process each invoice
  to payment
• Implement a solution able to grow with their
  increasing business load.

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Trendset - The Solution

• ABBYY FlexiCapture
• Because of the FlexiCapture Classification
  function they reduced their Invoice Sorting staff
  from 3 to 1
• Because of the FlexiCapture Classification
  function they reduced the staff preparing and
  inserting Patch Code and Cover Sheets from 4 to 0
• Because of the FlexiCapture Classification
  function Trendset saved 60,000 per year in the
  cost of separator documents
• Because of the powerful and accurate recognition
  capability of the FlexiCapture system they were
  able to reduce their Key Entry staff by 8
  operators.
• They were able to reduce the average time taken
  to enter an invoice into their system from 4/5
  days to just 3 days

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Invoice Approval
APPROVAL Invoices Authorized for Payment
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Workflow example
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Task Alert - Captaris or SharePoint Portal
Approval Workflow
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Client view
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Invoice Approval
Step 9 Invoice Meta Data view 1
Electronic signature added if necessary
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Audit Trail
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Customer Story

• Customer Story
• Virchow Krause Company

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Virchow Krause Company

• 15th largest CPA and Accounting firm in the USA
• Traditional Tax Audits, Assurance, Financial
  Planning
• Private Investment Banking
• Mergers and Acquisitions
• Consulting Services

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Virchow Krause Company Their Objectives

• Streamline their paper based Client Acceptance
  process
• Mitigate Risk
• Ensure Security
• Enforce company policies
• Provide a complete process audit trail
• Meet all regulatory requirements

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Virchow Krause Company The Solution

• Captaris WorkFlow
• Images and data available through Captaris or
  SharePoint Portal
• Rules based processing ensures no important steps
  overlooked during client acceptance processing
• Tasks assigned to named individuals increases
  security
• Monitoring and alerts inform management when
  corporate policies or procedures are being
  followed
• Full audit trail provides step by step recording
  for each document in the workflow
• Rules based processing ensure all regulatory
  compliance issues are addressed during processing

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Accounting and Document Management

APPROVAL Invoices Authorized for Payment
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Payment Authorization

• Payment Processing

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Task Alert in Portal - Captaris or SharePoint
Payment Workflow
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Authorize Cheque Payment
Payment Workflow
Step 9 Invoice Meta Data view 1
Signature matched with file copy
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Document Archival

• Document Archival

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Document Archival

• On request, Captaris WorkFlow can deliver
  Documents and Data to various Document Management
  Systems including Hummingbird
• Captaris offer a Document Archival and Retrieval
  system called Alchemy

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Invoice Image, Invoice Data and Audit Trail Data
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Lets See it in Action - The Demo
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Thank You - Merci

• Thank you - Merci
• Questions?