Capturing data from accounts payable invoices from suppliers can be time consuming for the AP Department. Most AP Departments who have not automated end up having an accounts payable processor enter all the relevant invoice information into your ERP or AP system manually by keying directly from paper or image. Not only is this time consuming for the accounts payable processor but accuracy of the data entry is subject to human mistakes.
There are several options AP Departments consider to automate the capturing of data from suppliers invoices.
- invest in optical character recognition software (OCR)
- Outsource the data capture of the invoices to a third party provider
- invest in PDF reading software to extract invocie data from PDF based invoices received via email
- Convert suppliers to submit invoices electronically as “eInvoices”
Best practice for AP Departments is to receive invoices in pure electronic data form as an eInvoice that can be imported into your ERP or AP System. However eInvoicing has a cost that may not be cost justifiable in all cases. Investing in OCR technology has benefits in automating the invoice capture without needing to manually key each invoice. However OCR could also be cost prohibitive in terms of software cost and time needed to validate the fields OCR is not accurate with. Additionally as more invoices become eInvoices every year, less and less invoices will need OCR technology so the cost per invoice for OCR will go up over time as more invoices convert to pure eInvoices. While eInvoicing and OCR may be cost prohibitive to some AP departments, a common alternative is to outsource the data capture to AP Conversion Service providers. These providers typically provide higher accuracy and faster turnaround on the invoice capture than your AP department can achieve themselves.