A simple overview of Accounts Payable automation technology

Let us give you our overly simple explanation of these technology tools, where they are used and what they do at a high level;

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is mainly used to digitise paper documents, contracts, invoices, sales orders, and PDFs and convert them into machine readable formats (for automating integration into your current systems, digitising and archiving documents).

Workflow is used to automatically route documents based on rules; i.e. delegation of authorities (DOA), special approvers based on expertise, etc. with the aim to streamline, expedite and eliminate current manual or paper-based processes.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

AI can be a powerful tool which uses logic, defined rules, and machine learning; the solution learns and trains itself to recognise different formats, templates and documents (common uses today are customer and vendor on-boarding, automating credit and loan applications, customer service inquiries, journal entries and more). This technology as it develops has the greatest probability to change the way business is conducted today and have the biggest impact on the way we work.

Notice all these current “disruptive” solutions and technological advancements aim to do the same thing; automate current manual business processes and eliminate paper while increasing productivity and reducing costs.