The complexity of processing an invoice from receipt to payment including approvals, investigation and validation is a daily challenge for many Accounts Payable Departments. According to Finance publication Accountancy Age, it can take an average 10.6 days to complete the tasks required to fully process an invoice, often resulting in missed early payment discounts and a negative impact upon supplier relationships. With increasing volumes, these side effects of slow and inefficient document processing add up and could significantly impact on an organisations’ growth and success.

Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), such as Celaton’s inSTREAM™ platform offers organisations a more efficient way to fully process invoices through its application of Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) technology to streamline the tasks within an end-to-end-process. For example, inSTREAM is able to process all invoices regardless of how they are received including paper (post), email and attachments, fax and EDI.  It is able to read and process all formats, structured, semi-structured and unstructured ensuring all invoices receive follow a single process through inSTREAM. inSTREAM extracts key data required including supplier information, product descriptions, PO number, invoice number, Net, VAT, Gross Values, date, etc. Once inSTREAM has extracted the data it carries out further essential accounts payable tasks including (but not limited to):