Accounts Payable Invoices

[Tom]

How can Accounts Payable automation benefit organizations?

Please could you outline the stages in accounts payable automation to streamline overall processes?

[seema.kothari1]

Hi! Tom,

For the first part of your question, please read the following AutomationEdge Community article. It details the benefits of Accounts Payables Automation.

How does RPA in Accounts Payable Enhance Data Accuracy?

Share This Story, Choose Your Platform! The accounts payable(AP) process is indeed the backbone of an organization as it directly impacts cash flow optimization, fraud prevention, and customer relationship. Also, the accounts payable process is specifically challenging due to the high dependency on human and paper-driven methods to complete the process. With rising customer preferences for convenience, high volume data errors, and risk to data threat banking and financial services …

[seema.kothari1]

Hi! Tom,

For the second part of your question, the typical stages in Accounts Payable automation to streamline the overall processes include the following.

1. Invoice Documents Ingestion (Download)

2. Invoices Data Extraction

3. Invoices Data Verification (check presence of Mandatory Fields)

4. Invoices Corrections (Manual on DocEdge repair screen)

5. Invoices Data Validations

6. Human Review, Reconciliation & Approval (Manual on DocEdge repair screen)

7. Posting invoices in Finance Applications/ERP (SAP etc.)

I will share details of each of the steps in the following posts.

[seema.kothari1]

Hi! Tom,

In this post I will describe the first stage -
Invoice Documents Ingestion (Download). This post is from the workflow design perspective in Process Studio.

1. Fetch invoices from source systems with Pending status. It includes one or more of the following operations: query tables, filter on source system; read excel files, use download utilities etc.

2. Compare (Merge) Vendor data in source Vendor master file and source Vendor table. Update the master file for any data mismatches.

3. Get Vendor Codes from the source Vendor master table. You can use the Group By step to concatenate all the vendor codes and set it as a variable for further processing.

4. Merge and fetch the invoice header data from invoice source tables. Filter for new records. Store in the InvoiceDetails automation table with status pending. Insert data in batches.

5. Get the count of pending invoices and store it in a variable.

6. Generate secure credentials to connect to target systems like ERP applications (SAP etc.) using btpass (BeyondTrustCloud). It involves connecting to btpass using the Advanced REST Client (ARC) step to call btpass APIs; to generate secure credentials.

7. Get PO Data from the target application (SAP etc.). Create the payload and encrypt it in the User Defined Java class; and use it in the ARC step to call the SAP API to fetch PO details. Decrypt the SAP output. Store in the podetails table.

8. Get Vendor data from the target application (SAP etc.). Create the payload and encrypt it in the User Defined Java class; and use it in the ARC step to call the SAP API to fetch Vendor details. Decrypt the SAP output. Update the status and remark in IBPSInvoiceDetails (Insert/Update step)

9. Get pending invoices from Invoice details table. Download the invoice (image or pdf) based on the data. In case you need to fetch the invoice documents using a Download utility, get the utility download file path. Prepare the command in a Modified Java Script (MJS) step. Execute the download utility using the Execute a Process step. Download Invoices. Update status, remarks and Updated Date in the IBPSInvoiceDetails table.

10. For example, the image below depicts a workflow with child workflows to fetch PO data, Vendor data and invoices (images or pdfs)

The image below is a sample Invoice Download workflow. It reads the pending invoices information from a table, creates a command to fetch invoice documents from a repository and then executes the command through the ‘Execute a Process’ step. It stores the invoices in a directory location and updates the status in a database.

We get the invoice documents copies in the Data Ingestion (Download) stage. Forward the invoice to the OCR tool.

[seema.kothari1]

In this post I will describe the second stage -
Invoice Data Extraction. After downloading the pending invoices pass them to an AutomationEdge workflow to perform OCR to extract invoices’ details. This post is from the workflow design perspective in Process Studio. The workflow typically contains steps to perform the following.

1. Perform OCR on the invoice documents using any OCR tool like Nanonet, Azure etc.

2. Check if the OCR operation has extracted all the mandatory invoice fields (provided by business users) in the OCR response.

3. If all the mandatory fields are present in the OCR response, then pass those invoice records to an invoice validation queue.

4. If any of the mandatory fields are missing, then pass those invoice records into the manual queue i.e., AutomationEdge DocEdge console for corrections to include the mandatory fields. We will see this in the third step for invoice correction in the next post.