Invoice Capture Software

Invoice Processing Machine: Automated AI Invoice Capture Software

Let Us Handle Your Invoice Digitization Needs

The best AP automation software provides a comprehensive solution to multiple bottlenecks in the accounts payable process. It will standardize your data, help the accounts payable team understand where invoices are, and ensure that information about liabilities and processing is transferred and stored correctly. In order to successfully do this, AP automation software needs to be both flexible and accurate. First, the system needs to reflect your data and work process needs. Then, it needs to return accurate, repeatable results – every time.

Clean Data Capture with Invoice Capture Software

 

At DataServ, we created the world’s first SaaS invoice capture software utilizing our efficient, intelligent Invoice Processing Machine (IPM) technology.

IPM employs AI that learns and has been learning from big data sets along with a semi-structured capture technique to more effectively locate important fields on each invoice. AP invoices are highly varied but follow a common base structure. IPM was created specifically for AP invoices and trained on giant sample sets. Because of this, your invoices are transformed into clean digital data, giving your company true invoice digitization along with the intelligence to identify vendors with extremely high accuracy to determine and apply specific rules to apply to that invoice.

Invoice recognition software plays a crucial role in ensuring data accuracy by automating the extraction of data from various invoice formats. With a great invoice scanning solution, your company can make a giant leap to eliminate manual data entry.

invoice illustration with OCR scanning information
cord with two adapters on either end

Your Universal Adaptor for Invoice Data for Accounts Payable Automation

DataServ’s IPM stands as the pinnacle of AP automation, perfected over 15 years of continuous learning. Our line-level capture technology, a standard IPM feature, ensures optimal downstream automation, capable of handling millions of invoices with unparalleled accuracy, even on some of the most complex invoices and transactions. Automated invoice processing further enhances this by streamlining workflows and improving data extraction accuracy through techniques like Optical Character Recognition and keyword-based pattern matching, making it particularly beneficial for industries such as eCommerce, shipping, and wholesale.

Our sophisticated capabilities in this area are tailored to each client to ensure the highest quality match. At the end of the day, it’s about clean data. There is no perfect invoice capture process – even data entry makes mistakes – so be sure that whatever solution you choose provides data validation. Why wait for the system to learn your invoices and business rules? Unlike other providers, DataServ performs the data validation for you, so your ramp-up time is zero and your savings are greater over time!

What are Invoice Capture and Invoice Scanning?

Definition of Invoice Capture vs. Invoice Scanning

Invoice capture is the process of converting physical or digital invoices into structured, machine-readable data. A subset of this is invoice scanning, in which paper documents are transformed into usable data. This can be achieved through various methods, such as using a traditional scanner for paper invoices, capturing digital photos of invoices with a smartphone, or manually entering the data into a computer system. A good invoice capture solution should be able to complete the conversion from any format into data that your AP system can use.

Invoice recognition software plays a crucial role in ensuring data accuracy by automating the extraction of data from various invoice formats. Invoice capture software takes the matching process a step further by employing optical character recognition (OCR) and machine learning technologies. These advanced tools digitize invoices, extracting and interpreting data with remarkable accuracy and efficiency. By leveraging invoice capture or invoice scanning software, businesses can streamline their invoice processing workflows and ensure that critical invoice data is captured accurately and promptly.

Importance of Invoice Capture in Accounts Payable

Invoice capture plays a pivotal role in the accounts payable process, enabling businesses to efficiently and accurately process invoices while significantly reducing manual data entry and the associated risk of errors. By automating the invoice scanning process, companies can streamline their accounts payable workflows, enhance productivity, and reduce operational costs.

Moreover, invoice scanning software helps businesses manage their cash flow more effectively, improve relationships with suppliers, and make informed financial decisions. The reduction in data entry not only saves time but also minimizes the likelihood of human errors, ensuring that invoice data is processed accurately and promptly. This automation ultimately leads to a more efficient and reliable accounts payable system, benefiting the entire organization.

How Does DataServ's IPM Invoice Capture Software Work?

Overview of Invoice Data Capture Software

Invoice data capture software is a sophisticated tool that utilizes OCR and machine learning to extract data from invoices and convert it into a digital format. The software typically follows these steps:

  1. Scanning or capturing invoices: The software scans or captures invoices from various sources, such as paper documents, email attachments, or online portals.
  2. Using OCR to extract data: The software employs OCR technology to extract data from the invoices, including crucial information such as invoice numbers, dates, amounts, and vendor names. Accurate data capture will require accurate scanning, parsing, and mapping of information.
  3. Interpreting and validating the extracted data: Next, the invoice capture software has to transform the data into a usable format. This can be done through any kind of software program that matches text. DataServ’s IPM invoice processing software leverages years of data with our proprietary AI technology. The software interprets and validates the extracted invoice data to ensure its accuracy and completeness.
  4. Integrating the data with existing accounting systems: The software seamlessly integrates the extracted data with existing accounting systems, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, enabling smooth processing and payment of invoices.

By automating the invoice scanning process, businesses can significantly reduce manual data entry, improve accuracy, and boost productivity. Additionally, invoice data capture software aids in better cash flow management, enhances supplier relationships, and supports informed financial decision-making. This advanced technology ensures that invoice data is captured accurately and efficiently, providing a reliable foundation for the accounts payable process.

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DataServ's IPM Process Flow

Ingestion

By simply redirecting your current email address(es) to DataServ, IPM effortlessly captures invoice, statement, and credit memo data, along with non-invoice documents. During ingestion, IPM handles various invoice formats using advanced technologies like OCR and AI to accurately extract data, ensuring efficiency and reducing manual errors. AP email boxes are a prime target for bad actors. Spam, viruses, and ransomware all pose high risks to your organization. IPM weeds these out before they get to your staff, thus protecting them and the data integrity of your company.

Classification

IPM accepts any invoice in any format (PDF, XML, EDI, etc), therefore, invoices undergo meticulous classification. P.O. invoices are split from Non-PO invoices. Credit memos are separated from statements. EDI is processed. In this stage, documents are separated and designated based on type, ensuring efficient processing. Invoice processing software plays a crucial role in this classification, automating the capture and processing of invoices to enhance accuracy and productivity.

Validation

Our advanced validation layers, including industry-standard and client-specific validations, ensure precise data extraction, from key fields to complex validations, for guaranteed accuracy and reliability. Invoice OCR software plays a crucial role in this process by automating the extraction and validation of data from invoices.

Quality Assurance

Final quality checks are conducted by our specialized, highly trained Quality Assurance staff at DataServ to ensure that the machine and the AI continue to improve over time for all clients.

Achieve over 99% clean data with IPM Invoice Capture Software

With one simple email rule change all of the invoices will immediately flow to DataServ!

DataServ's Invoice Scanning Software Features

We eliminate manual data entry and ensure you get the full value from your automation investment.

Turnkey Large Scale Document Ingestion

Simply redirect your existing AP email boxes to DataServ. Built-in virus and SPAM protection. Start with one location or division and evolve to the entire enterprise. Global capabilities can process invoices from anywhere, 24x7x365. Intelligent Vendor Capture recognizes senders' email addresses to improve accuracy and reduce vendor not found exceptions.

Data Capture

Emailed invoices are not digital invoices! As the creators of the Invoice Processing Machine (the world’s first SaaS OCR), our invoice data capture capabilities are highly optimized specifically for Accounts Payable. We completely transform the invoices into useful digital data typically within 24 hours. Leverage this machine without any set-up or maintenance - it's already running every day, and processing millions of invoices.

Normalization

Think of IPM as a “universal adaptor”, or the funnel that receives all variety of invoices (and other documents) and transforms them into a standard, optimized format for further processing. Whether received as email with or without PDF attachments (by far the most common), XML, spreadsheets, embedded in the email body, EDI or even paper mail - DataServ automatically converts 100% of your vendor invoices to the best format for data capture accuracy and then user readability.

Classification

P.O. invoices are separated from Non-P.O. invoices for additional capture that will feed AutoVouch™. We enrich the captured data with your financial data, determine the match types for vouching purposes. and perfect the images received electronically. Splitting multi-invoice PDF’s into separate invoices, inserting appropriate page breaks and more is automated within DataServ.

Human Validation

Data validation specialists review and correct values captured during the OCR process by matching against the original image and client supplied system data. We use both industry standard and client-tailored validation rules to correct and cleanse invalid data. Elevated human review services are applied until accuracy is optimized - all at no extra charge. This Human in the Loop process increases the effectiveness of all further automation downstream.

Quality Assurance

Our integrated and highly-evolved Quality process has been designed with several feedback loops for the system to learn and improve. Highly-trained experts review the work of our human validation teams. Each new client receives elevated QA until accuracy is optimized - all at no extra charge. This is how DataServ eliminates the typical OCR "learning curve" for all clients.

Drawbacks of Typical OCR Invoice Scanning

Most APIA solution providers offer about 60 percent accuracy for invoice data capture. How does that look in a typical AP department?

If a single invoice has an average of 6 fields, and the business processes 10,000 invoices per month, that would equal a total of 60,000 OCR fields to scan per month.

If only 60 percent of the data captured from an AP solution’s optical character recognition is accurate, then about 24,000 of those OCR fields will be inaccurate.

If an average of 2.4 fields per invoice are inaccurate, every invoice will still have to be checked manually for accuracy before pushing to an ERP. A process that would be more expensive and time-consuming than manually processing invoices in the first place!

Drawbacks of Relying Exclusively on AI in Automated Invoice Capture Software

OCR alone does not adequately process invoices – but neither does AI.

AI and Machine Learning in invoice processing software improves invoice usability by comparing your invoice data to a database of other invoices to predict likely values and alter values where they must be inaccurate.

To do this well, the AI that processes your invoices must be highly trained on invoice processing in general, and it must be able to identify unique needs in your business’s invoices.

Only DataServ’s IPM solution uses an AI trained on 30 years of invoice data to process your invoices. Because our models are more robust, it’s faster and easier to identify unique patterns in your company’s invoices. Other invoice processing solutions tend to overcorrect customer invoices because they can’t identify when data is meaningfully different as opposed to when it’s simply incorrect. Because of our experience in the industry, DataServ is able to get you a more reliable solution more quickly.

Read more about successfully using AI in accounts payable on our blog.

Invoice Processing Machine FAQs

Capture accuracy should be evaluated based on Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), error rates, precision, and recall metrics. DataServ’s IPM delivers the lowest TCO because DataServ is responsible for all of the upkeep and performance tuning which maintains a consistently high accuracy rate, ensuring reliable data extraction.
Yes, our IPM technology is designed to handle any invoice format and a wide range of image qualities, ensuring consistent performance, even with low-quality images. ERP system integration with invoice capture solutions further enhances efficiency. EDI, XML and some PDF formats that provide clean data still receive QA review by DataServ.
Yes. While technology significantly reduces manual data entry, most capture software relies on human validation to ensure accuracy, particularly in cases of complex invoices. DataServ does not push this manual validation work to our clients, thus maximizing your savings.
IPM is capable of extracting any information from your invoices, including line item details, part numbers, unique and complex units of measure, credits, surcharges, sophisticated freight schemes and more. Crucial details such as vendor numbers that cannot be found on invoices are also integrated into your DataServ process.

Ensure Clean Data Capture with IPM by DataServ

Experience the rapid time to value and reliability of DataServ’s highly-trained AI in the Invoice Processing Machine for yourself. Schedule a consultation with our team today and discover how IPM can revolutionize your accounts payable processes.