In today's fast-paced business world, efficiently managing your financial processes is absolutely crucial. Invoice data extraction is a prime example. When mismanaged, this tedious and tiresome task can take up a significant amount of your resources and still allow mistakes like late and duplicate payments.
In this blog post, we will discuss the pains of manual invoice data extraction and walk through how Centime's AP automation solution can automate this process for your business.
The Tedious Nature of Manual Invoice Data Extraction
Manually extracting invoice data is a laborious task that involves entering data from paper invoices or PDFs into your business’ accounting system.
This process is not only time-consuming but also prone to errors such as typos, incorrect data entry, and duplicate entries. These mistakes can lead to significant financial discrepancies and negatively impact your company’s bottom line.
The Cost of Manual Invoice Processing
In addition to being a slow and risky process, manual invoice data extraction comes at a steep cost for your businesses. In fact, a 2022 report by Ardent Partners found that AP teams spend nearly 11 days and more than $10 just to process a single invoice.
Moreover, with the increasing volume of invoices that organizations receive, the cost of manual data extraction is only expected to rise along with your company’s growth. Along with the costs, the number of errors will also rise as you try to scale your manual approach.
Centime’s Invoice Data Capture Solution: A Combined Approach with OCR and AI
In order to combat the issues described above, Centime is at the forefront of technologies helping improve the speed, accuracy, and efficiency of invoice processing. By using Centime’s OCR and AI technology to automate your invoice data capture, your team can:
- Reduce Costs
- Boost Efficiency and Productivity
- Unlock Accuracy and Scalability
- Provide Visibility and Transparency
- Strengthen Vendor Relations
- Improve Your Employee Experience
Centime's AP automation solution combines traditional optical character recognition (OCR) with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) technology to automatically extract data from your invoices, minimizing the need to manually extract invoice data.
Instead, our AP automation platform uses a bi-directional integration to sync with your general ledger and upload your invoice data directly into your company’s accounting system. This drastically improves upon other invoice data extraction methods and reduces your risk of human errors.
Centime's solution is also much more versatile than other invoice data capture methods because it can adapt to variations in invoice formats, layouts, and fonts. Thanks to its combination of AI, ML and OCR, our AP automation solution can understand the context of different data fields on your invoice and better categorize your data.
In practice, this means that the system can identify different information on an invoice, distinguishing between fields like an invoice number vs a supplier name or a line quantity. Its ability to understand the context and relationships between different data fields is what elevates Centime’s invoice data capture to be more accurate and perform better than traditional data extraction methods and even other AP automation platforms.
AP Automation in Action: SYNERGY HomeCare Streamlines Invoice Capture with Centime
SYNERGY HomeCare provides a full range of home-care services to clients across their franchise network of 400 territories and 280 operating offices. They rely heavily on their finance team to keep operations running smoothly so they can deliver the highest quality of care to their customers.
For SYNERGY’s Accountant, Janice Helzer, this required overseeing the entire accounts payable process with only manual tools: tediously updating spreadsheets and disparate email chains to log invoices, manage approvals, and track payment confirmations. With over a hundred invoices to process monthly, SYNERGY’s manual approach was slow and unsustainable, not to mention at risk of costly errors and mistakes.
The SYNERGY team knew they needed a modern, digital solution to centralize and automate their AP workflow. They partnered with Centime to integrate invoice processing, approval routing, and payments onto a single platform.
Now with Centime’s AP solution, SYNERGY transformed their siloed, tedious AP workflow into a single system where they can easily manage and store all invoices. This new system saves their team 40 hours per month.
Check out the full SYNERGY case study to learn more about how Centime centralized SYNERGY’s invoice management system, paving the way for a more efficient and reliable accounts payable workflow.
Conclusion
In conclusion, manual invoice data extraction can be a major burden for organizations. It is a time-consuming and error-prone process that comes at a significant cost. However, you can use Centime’s AP solution to automate your invoice data extraction process and significantly reduce the pains associated with it.
So, if you are tired of dealing with manual invoice data extraction and want a more efficient and accurate solution, try out Centime's AP automation solution for free by clicking the banner below.
