Why businesses should use OCR software

As many as 37% of companies still route their invoices manually. This results in unexpected delays. Further, it results in delays in vendor payments. In such drastic scenarios, the receipt processing could hit a brick wall and require a fresh billing cycle from scratch! Optical Character Recognition can be defined as the process where an image of text is converted into a machine-readable text format.

For example, your computer saves the scan as an image file when you scan a form or a receipt.

Accounts payable is a critically important function for every business. The AP team is responsible for keeping accurate records, paying suppliers on time, and preventing unplanned expenses.

However, the AP team relies on manual invoice processing to track and pay invoices. These challenges include slow processing, lost invoices, or the wrath of double payment. These issues arise primarily because processing invoices manually is inefficient and highly error-prone. Despite these drawbacks, several businesses keep still rely on Manual processing.

But we are here to tell you about a better way! OCR software can be really beneficial for a variety of applications. It helps you automate your invoice processing with high accuracy. It helps interpret invoices received as Microsoft Word or Google Docs, hard copies, PDFs, etc, and punches them into the system automatically.

This blog will encompass the pain points of manual receipt processing and how data automation with KlearStack’s OCR software can help you streamline your accounts payable workflows to save time and money.

Why Do You Need Data Automation to Streamline Your Receipt Workflows?

The traditional, manual invoice processing approach will expose you to several risks we explain later in the blog. The best investment you can make to solve and prevent manual receipt processing challenges is getting yourself an expert OCR software that takes care of data automation, handles invoice processing, and more..

Specifically, you can use a document intelligence platform like KlearStack that extracts data from invoices. KlearStack feeds your accounting system with all invoice data. Then your system handles the rest of the AP workflow, such as invoice matching and approval.

Data automation is a game-changer for accounts payable teams because it eliminates the risk intrinsic to manual tasks and reduces the number of steps and people involved in AP workflows.               

With KlearStack’s efficient data automation and document intelligence services, you can get the following benefits on receipt processing:

•       Document intelligence and data automation help you automate mundane daily tasks. Technology can most efficiently complete tasks that are difficult and time-consuming for humans.
•       Data Automation is the key to effectively analyzing big data, especially concerning receipts and invoices.
•       Data automation saves your company time and money. Employee time is generally more expensive than computing resources concerning data analysis. To add to this, KleasrStack’s OCR software can perform analytics efficiently.
•       By automating tasks that don’t involve a high degree of human ingenuity or imagination, the employees can focus on new insights to guide data-driven decision-making.

Pain points of manual processing of receipts:

Delay: 

Receipts and invoices often take time to be entered manually in a  database. Approving them is also time-consuming because the receipts go to multiple departments and are forgotten in a pile of paperwork. The involvement of several employees makes the process lengthy. Hence, the process is often delayed due to a high amount of human intervention.

This further results in late payments impacts your the supplier’s cash flow. This further impacts your relationship with them. Your company might also be missing out on early payment discounts, and you might even have to pay penalties. Hence, processing unpaid invoices create a lot of stress for the employees and aids delay in work that can be efficiently carried out if data automation is incorporated for receipt processing.

Frequent Non-Compliances:

With multiple receipts pouring in from multiple business units and no consistent or cohesive workflow, a team’s work can be easily fragmented. This hinders centralized visibility, compliance, and governance, which becomes a problem when it is time for the business to scale. Businesses lose out on compliance and are unable to cross deadlines due to delays. These businesses face penalties in severe cases.

Lean Losses:

Manual data causes issues like double payment. In some cases lack of payment. The supplier sends a second invoice owing to the delay in payment. Hence, the AP team ends up paying double.

In any of these cases, the supplier is paid twice, friction is created between both parties. Also, this results in an additional workload for the employees. This leads to monetary losses. The root cause of such issues is manual invoice processing.

With human capital, processing a large number of invoices requires larger teams.

However, the team’s productivity is doubted when there is low document inflow.

So what to look for in a data automation platform? Consider this checklist when starting out on your data automation journey.

•       A quick start: Contemplate how much time and effort your prospective data automation platform will require to get you started with your first document.
•       Easy use: How easy is it to operate and maintain daily?
•       Intelligence: How user-friendly is it to document format changes? Can it extract data based on content?
•       Automation end to end: Is it just a document processing solution, or can it help you automate data entry downstream and drive insights from the data?

Great news for you! KlearStack’s AI-driven OCR software checks off all of these points and is the perfect document intelligence platform for your business. Eliminate 98% of manual work. With a straight-through processing platform like KlearStack’s OCR software, you can make your enterprise automation grow via impeccable document extraction and interpretation. 

Make your enterprise automation grow with KlearStack’s document extraction, interpretation, and straight-through processing platform. Schedule a demo with our experts today!