Digital invoice processing and automation is leaving OCR behind

Manual invoice processing is no doubt one of the leading pain points in accounts payable. AP professionals are eager to implement automation solutions that can cut down on tedious data entry and time spent on menial invoicing tasks.

According to a study from iPayables, long approval and payment processes and paper invoicing accounted for 40 percent of the leading frustrations faced by AP professionals today. Nearly 100 percent of study respondents expressed that the solution is AP automation technology.

Paper-based, manual processing is a huge issue and providers have been trying to find alternative solutions for years.

Optical Character Recognition, or OCR, was essentially the beginning of invoice automation, with the goal of improving efficiency. It was a really good start, but OCR won't hold up in the future. As the adoption of truly digital e-invoicing advances rapidly, the true benefits of invoice automation are realized, and they don't include OCR.

Why is OCR not sufficient? In reality, it's not foolproof, leaving a substantial gap that requires manual review and input. For one-off transactions and infrequent purchases, it's not accurate, and improving accuracy takes more time and money to set up than it would to process the invoice manually. With today's capabilities, it would be a bigger benefit for a company to have smart software that uses the digital transfer of vendor invoices to the buyer to maintain a consistent and accurate record of activity.

Teaching suppliers and employees to use OCR takes up a lot of resources and time. On top of that, OCR is only a band-aid solution to remedy the issue of paper-based invoice processing, but doesn't do much to solve it. Today's AP ...