Accounts Payable is one of the most tedious accounting processes requiring a huge amount of manual entry. While Optical Character Recognition or OCR solutions can help boost efficiency of AP management, without the right AP automation system to compliment the benefits of OCR, image capture can only do so much.
While there are obvious and undeniable benefits that come with the ability to automatically pull data from paper documents and digitize it, accounts payable requires a certain level of accuracy that reduces the standalone benefits of OCR.
The top OCR solutions will boast a 90-percent accuracy rate which in reality translates to 10-percent failure rate, and most financial managers will agree having inaccurate data in 1 of every 10 fields is unacceptable. So, this still translates to a lot of manual entry and double-checking.
While smart OCR solutions will learn to process repeated invoice templates with increasing accuracy, there are always new vendors, new invoices from existing vendors and invoices for one-off jobs that come through AP departments on a regular basis. This means that there will always be inaccuracy in OCR solutions.
Most businesses need an end-to-end AP Automation and Management solution to keep pace with increasing speed of business. A truly holistic AP solution will mitigate all pain points along the accounts payable process and will offer an OCR solution combined with human assessment to ensure the accuracy of invoice processing.
Beyond this, very few OCR solutions are capable of dynamic location support. This means reading ‘ship to' addresses and adjusting the coding applied to the invoice. This added layer of capture (which is supported by Fidesic OCR) enables more accurate coding, and more accurate routing for invoice approval.
While OCR solutions are a critical step to automating accounts payable, they are only one piece of the large AP automation puzzle.