These solutions once set up are extremely efficient and can lead to significant cost saving due to the potential numbers of staff required to process invoices, as in the main the staff are only dealing with the exceptions.

Most of these systems offer self learning OCR solutions which "learn" as the invoices are scanned, they look for all the obvious fields that you would expect on an invoice. These include, company name and address, invoice number and date, vat number, vat amount, gross and net amounts. It identifies these fields and the first time an invoice is scanned it offers a “best fit” for that invoice for that vendor. The first step is to verify what has been offered or adjust/match the fields, once the invoice has been verified the next time an invoice is scanned for that vendor it will match.

These systems also come with their own flexible workflow solutions and one central screen which display the status of all the invoices in the system.

Once scanned the invoice posts into SAP and based on pre set matching criteria certain actions will happen, if it matches the PO exactly it will be available to  pay.  If it doesn’t match the purchase order, it will block, work flow will start and route the item to the creator of the PO for them to either accept or reject. If they accept the differences, the invoice will unblock and become available for payment. If they reject the invoice they will be prompted for a rejection reason and it will then be work flowed back to accounts payables for them to deal with.

Again this will work best if the business is issuing purchase orders for the majority of its spend as that will increase the automatic matching this is dependent on the vendor has quoted the PO number on the invoice.