Today's finance teams must juggle a long list of responsibilities, from managing compliance and cash flows to controlling costs and improving operational efficiency. The last thing they need is to be bogged down by their own internal processes.
The traditional approach to matching purchase orders (POs) with invoices and receipts remains a stumbling block for most accounts payable (AP) teams. It's a vital yet cumbersome task that significantly hampers the efficiency of AP operations. In this blog, we'll explore how Centime's PO Matching functionality streamlines traditional PO matching practices by harnessing AI to automate and enhance the entire process.
Challenges with Traditional PO Matching Approaches
PO matching requires finance teams to manually confirm that the details on a supplier's invoice align with the corresponding purchase order and goods receipt. This process consumes significant time as teams meticulously determine which items on an invoice correspond to those on a PO and verify that the quantities and prices match across the documents. The process is inherently manual and tedious, leaving it vulnerable to human errors that can lead to delays and even overpayments.
Discrepancies between invoices, POs, and receipts are all too common. Resolving them often forces AP managers to chase down colleagues in other departments via email or other disconnected communication tools, delaying payments and straining supplier relationships. Additionally, traditional PO matching lacks a clear audit trail, which increases the risk of compliance issues and makes it challenging to identify process inefficiencies or trace errors.
These problems are particularly prevalent in industries where purchase orders are standard, such as manufacturing, construction, healthcare, and technology, where POs are necessary for ordering materials and equipment.
Centime's Automatic PO Matching
Enter Centime's automated PO matching solution—a game changer for finance teams. Centime takes the pain out of PO-based invoice processing by automatically linking and comparing invoices with purchase orders and receipts, flagging any mismatches, and enabling AP managers to easily connect with stakeholders to resolve these discrepancies. This approach significantly reduces the time taken to process each PO-invoice, all while enforcing proper controls and minimizing risk.
Centime's PO Matching functionality sets a new standard by using cutting-edge invoice data extraction, powered by Generative AI, to capture supplier invoices with remarkable accuracy and speed. It also fully integrates with your general ledger's purchase order (PO) and receiving features to synchronize PO-invoice data seamlessly.
How Centime's PO Matching Benefits AP Teams
Centime's PO Matching tool is a leap forward for AP teams, slashing matching efforts and costs by over 90%. By automating the early stages of invoice processing, it moves the focus from repetitive data entry to handling exceptions. Invoices that match purchase orders (POs) and receipts sail through, while mismatches are flagged for review, cutting down processing time significantly.
Take this example: An AP clerk handling 100 PO invoices a month would spend roughly 17 hours doing it manually. At $25 an hour, that's $425 a month or over $5,100 a year. Centime's solution minimizes these inefficiencies, saving valuable time and resources while boosting productivity.
Centime’s approval workflows also facilitate better collaboration, connecting AP managers directly with procurement and receiving colleagues to quickly resolve any discrepancies. This is a significant improvement over traditional methods, where resolving mismatches could involve lengthy and convoluted email chains or slack messages.
The benefits are equally compelling for finance leaders. The automation and efficiency provided by Centime allow businesses to maintain strict controls over their purchasing processes without the need to inflate AP processing costs. This not only helps in scaling operations without proportionately increasing the AP headcount but also provides a full audit trail that enhances transparency and compliance.
Conclusion
Centime’s automated PO matching solution represents a significant step forward in how companies manage their accounts payable processes. It addresses traditional PO matching challenges head-on, offering a robust, efficient, and error-reducing approach that saves time and money. By automating the tedious aspects of invoice processing and enhancing the auditability of the entire process, Centime not only improves operational efficiency but also contributes to better strategic financial management.
With economic pressures mounting and the need for stringent cost control more important than ever, Centime's PO Matching comes at a crucial time. Its significant gains in productivity, collaboration, and risk reduction make it an essential tool for modern finance teams, empowering them to handle their responsibilities efficiently without holding them back with outdated processes.
