Invoice matching automation saves time, effort and costly mistakes

Untitled design 72 | Invoice matching automation saves time, effort and costly mistakes
By Toby Lester | 8th July 2020 | 8 min read

Picture the scene.

The purchase order number on an invoice has been misprocessed again and matched against the wrong records.

Your staff are fed up with the process. They pay less attention as they work and have started making more and more costly mistakes.

Your bottom line has been affected as your finances are no longer accurate. You have little confidence in your overall financial assessment.

Your suppliers have been let down by late payments and are reconsidering their business relationship.

Is this a situation you want to be stuck in?

The root of the problem

All of these issues stem from a single faulty process – manual invoice processing. It’s the same way things have been done for years, and your organisation has continued to thrive despite it. But, in today’s fast-paced technological world, it’s starting to fall behind.

What if we can turn the whole process on its head?

Some believe that invoice matching should be done by standardising invoice layouts, but organisations aren’t interested in doing this. Widespread standardisation isn’t going to happen overnight, if at all.

There are alternatives. With today’s modern technologies, invoice-reading software is becoming commonplace in the market. If you’re going to solve your invoicing issues, the best option needs to be capable of interpreting a huge range of different invoice styles.

That’s what IRIS Invoice Matcher is designed to do – recognise and then learn so that other organisations are not repeating the process.

Automating your invoice matching

Manual systems require trained, knowledgeable personnel to run them, with acute attention to detail. There’s an opportunity cost to this – these members of staff then aren’t available for more value-added tasks.

It’s also a tedious task and it’s easy to fail. These errors are difficult to pick up, and they often won’t be noticed until downstream tasks and processes fail. This can be incredibly costly for your organisation – we’re sure you can remember at least one situation where this has happened to you. This cost eventually comes off the bottom line.

IRIS Invoice Matcher makes these errors an impossibility. Thanks to machine learning, it can recognise a huge number of individual invoice styles and accurately read the contents of every field, ensuring a virtually non-existent error rate. The more the technology is used, the quicker the results, with greater accuracy. This technology is used by over 6,500 organisations worldwide, so it can read your invoices out-of-the-box.

In fact, it’s more accurate than human processors, up to 71% faster and a staggering 80% less expensive.

Liberate your staff

Staff also love it – they want to manage the process, not be a manual calculator and checker.

Manual invoice matching necessitates expensive knowledge workers. In many ways, this is a waste of some of your best talent, and they would be better reassigned to more important strategic tasks.

These skilled staff shouldn’t be stuck doing fairly rudimentary data entry – especially when the technology now exists to automate the process.

Seasonal businesses are disproportionately affected by the problem of human labour. During peak times, there can be many, many more invoices to process than can be handled. It’s difficult, nigh impossible, to pluck short-term, experienced accounting staff members from thin air as and when you need them. However, an automated system never struggles with its workload, so seasonality doesn’t affect IRIS Invoice Matcher.

How to get started

If you’re interested in revolutionising your invoicing process, there’s no better place to start than with a free demonstration of IRIS Invoice Matcher.

You can avoid late payments, improve your supplier relationships and free your staff from labour-intensive tasks by making one simple change – so why not see what all the fuss is about?