Touchless Process for Invoice Matching Now the New Norm

Many organizations were forced to move their teams to remote work a couple of years ago and have continued working from home since. 

The initial move was a nightmare for AP departments who relied on manual invoice delivery and matching processes. Hopefully, that process has been ironed out. But in case your department is still functioning on a band-aid solution, there are SaaS-based automation solutions to help.

How Does Touchless Invoice Matching Work?

Thanks to the latest in Artificial Intelligence, there are ways for AP teams to automatically match invoices to purchase orders (POs) and receipts and auto-approve them.

With no touch required before payment, this process eliminates the need for human interaction with complex invoice transactions saving tremendous amounts of time and money. Additionally, your team will now have more time to focus on working on the remaining exceptions and identifying opportunities to make continuous improvements so more will flow through in a touchless manner over time.

This concept is central to DataServ’s Exception-based, AI-powered APIA (Accounts Payable Invoice Automation) solution.

Below is a sample step-by-step process of how touchless invoice matching works:

1. All invoices, regardless of form or format (I.e. paper, email, EDI, other) are converted into a single stream of normalized digital data that is validated and guaranteed to be 99% accurate. This is a crucial first step that is necessary for downstream automation and offers optimal time savings for AP teams, as well as being far more supplier friendly than other approaches in the market which is important, especially considering today’s challenging supply chain environments.
2. Related key data elements are then integrated into the solution as well such as your Vendor Master File data, GL data, P.O. file data, and Receipt file data. This data is used to validate invoice data and match it against available P.O. &/or Receipt file data for automated 2 or 3-way matching.
3. Each invoice that successfully matches through this “pre-ERP” process is then passed back into your ERP systems, fully vouched and approved for payment per your payment policies.
4. For those that do not successfully match, they are routed to a number of differing “Exception Queues” based on the core reason they may not have matched, allowing your team to ease the process of reviewing and approving them for payment, as well as more easily identifying and prioritizing opportunities for continuous improvement in automation over time.
5. This system can also ease the process of service-based purchases without available receipts data, as well as, Non-P.O. based transactions, through multiple features and functionality such as automated initial routing, auto-coding, and apply past coding just to name a few. All are designed to ease and enhance a modern Exception-based, AI-powered, APIA (Accounts Payable Invoice Automation) process.

This solution provides clients fully touchless invoice processing on up to  80-90% of their PO invoices, freeing up your teams to focus on higher-value tasks and drive continuous improvement.

Go Touchless with DataServ AutoVouch™