Our last webinar in the GoSmarter webinar series was about automating the processing of received invoices to eliminate the cost and hassle of errors, late payments and dealing with paper documents. With businesses already losing around 150 days a year to admin, invoice processing can suck up to 10% of that time. An invoice can cost between £4-25 to manually process and over 3% of them contain errors, costing on average £40 to rectify. Manual invoice processing is costly and time-consuming, making it a perfect case for applying automation.

Automation and AI for increased efficiency

So how do we automate invoice processing? We do it in three phases, two automation steps, with an AI step sandwiched in the middle.

• Detect - automatically save invoices from your inbox
• Process - use OCR to extract details
• Store - automatically send details to a centralised repository or spreadsheet

By automatically detecting invoices in your inbox, you won’t need to hunt down invoices and you’ll never miss a payment request. The AI then step uses OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to convert the invoice image into computer-readable text. The final step takes this text and stores those details in a centralised repository so it can’t be lost.

The #GoSmarter invoice processor tool

There are a few invoice processing tools on the market which, Mia compares in the webinar, explaining that the only downfall is the price build up when you reach a certain number of invoices per month or want to add users to the service.

Our GoSmarter tool is designed to be lower cost as the number of invoices accumulates. It also has a bigger focus on automating the detection of invoices, meaning you can consolidate invoices from a wider range of sources. This is extremely valuable when your suppliers aren’t using some of the approved invoice apps that connect with the other tools. You’ll be able to train the tool to recognise invoices from your suppliers, and once trained using about 5 invoices per supplier, you won’t have to find invoices from them again, as your tool will find them for you.

• Consolidate invoices from a variety of sources faster and with fewer errors than any manual process
• Automatically generate a digital record of all invoices in one place that is easy to organise and trace
• Process invoices as they come and avoid costly errors or duplicates

Getting the most out of Power Automate

Our solution is built on Microsoft’s Power Automate which costs a monthly subscription of £11.30/month. Power Automate is also used in our Process Automation tool, so you can get a lot more use out of it than just invoicing. Mia talks us through some of the other uses in the video below.

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Take back control of Processing Invoicing by Automating. (GoSmarter.ai) from StephanieOrgan1

Full webinar video

Keeping on top of your cash flow is essential to any business and automation of invoice processing can make it easy, too. There are no excuses! Access our Invoice Processor and other SME automation tools by singing up to our app.

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