It's no secret that every organisation wants better data quality and improved accuracy, and even more so when it comes to invoice processing and automation.
To create an awareness of the benefits of invoice automation, Kofax, in partnership with ITWeb, conducted an online Invoice Automation Survey during June 2014 to gauge and understand the current invoice automation landscape in SA and to gather information about the needs of organisations when it comes to invoice automation.
"Much is known about processes and challenges being faced by finance departments overseas; however, this invoice automation survey gives us an opportunity to gain a better understanding of, and create a benchmark for, local organisations," says Gia Thom, business development manager at Intervate (a T-Systems company).
"There are several challenges involved in not having an AP [accounts payable] automation solution, which include having no backups; labour intensive manual processes; and delays due to one person working with one document to making certain tasks obsolete for users (processing an entire invoice only to discover it is a duplicate, typing relevant information into the ERP system, validating SARS compliance, manually reconciling invoices for payment to a supplier statement)," Thom says.
Moreover, without automation, as sales increase, an organisation's accounts department will have to grow to cater for the increase, resulting in the AP process becoming more difficult for an organisation to manage, explains Thom.
"Thankfully, with the advance in technologies, there are a number of benefits to having an invoice automation process in place. Queries are reduced by proactively notifying suppliers of payment status; exceptions are resolved quicker by managing tasks and escalations; opportunities for early payment discounts are taken due to faster processing time and internal and external audits have less impact due to improved accuracy."
When comparing South African trends for invoice automation, Thom believes that, in recent years, local organisations have been faced with a mandate to drastically reduce costs.
"Many organisations have turned to IT innovations to reduce costs. The overall trend has seen a move towards Shared Service Centres in order to amortise costs, which is specifically valid within the finance and accounts payable space," she adds.
Once the processes have been streamlined, the next step is invariably automation, advises Thom.
Intervate has been focusing on invoice automation and procurement processes for several years but has extended this offering to supplier statement reconciliation.
"At Intervate, significant development is being done in the field of automated supplier statement reconciliation. Statement reconciliation is generally a tedious and extremely time consuming process. Automating this process provides massive time saving and greatly improves overall department efficiency and productivity, while simultaneously reducing fraud."
"Much emphasis has been placed on such trends as cloud and big data. Organisations now expect the flexibility of having their information and systems available everywhere, all the time that cloud solutions provide, while the insights and actionable information provided by instantly accessible big data applications has become essential."
Thom believes that finance departments are no different.
"Current invoice automation, such as Kofax, provides the ability to process transactions anytime, anywhere, while analytics ensure that stakeholders have all the information required to make decisions at their fingertips," she says.
Elaborating further on the issue of mobility, Thom believes that providing a mobile platform is expected in all areas of IT services and that within AP, bottlenecks such as managerial approvals, exception handling and query resolution are greatly improved by the access-anywhere nature of mobile technology.
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