Invoices are something that financial people love and hate.
As a common financial link, invoice processing is the basic skill of almost every financial person. However, this skill also caused a lot of troubles to financial staff.
01
What makes financial people so stressful?
Recently, a "Research Report on the Survival Status of Financial Groups in 2020" revealed the pressure of financial professionals in China. According to the survey, the most "stressful" for financial professionals is not the cost control of the enterprise or the dominance of professional careers, but Invoice reimbursement.
From tax declaration, financial statement analysis, to the company's financial cost control, so many financial links, why is invoice reimbursement so powerful?
Because this is a thankless job.
Although the era of paperless office has come, in fact, paper invoices still have very high application scenarios. Invoice processing involves a lot of repetitive operations, and manual data entry usually takes up the time and energy of most financial staff, which is boring and lacks competitiveness.
For professional financial companies and bookkeeping companies, this is even more so. The heavy bill entry and management work consumes a lot of labor costs.
02
Ubiquitous invoice processing: the classic scenario of "Invoice RPA"
Invoice processing is everywhere, from purchase to payment, order to collection, to order verification, accounts payable, to fund management, tax management, and it can be found in many financial scenarios in industries.
Hundreds of billions of invoices carry massive amounts of information, and the content of invoices is very important data for enterprises, which are used in tax certification, supplier management, contract management, reimbursement management, customer management and other business aspects .
For such an important "thing", how can companies and financial personnel handle it more efficiently?
With the "Big Four" actively promoting financial robots, RPA has already detonated the financial circle, and many financial companies have found new solutions to reduce costs and increase efficiency through RPA.
RPA, a software robot that can simulate human keyboard and mouse operations on a computer and automatically perform tasks in accordance with certain rules, is especially suitable for processing cross-system and cross-platform data collection, sorting, and input operations.
Although RPA was not specifically developed to deal with financial work, the application of RPA technology is quite abundant in actual financial work.
1. Accounts payable
Industry: Education
A large educational institution processes more than 3,000 invoices for more than 10 schools every month.
Before applying RPA:
When receiving a single batch of invoices, manually input a large amount of invoice data into the ERP system, which is a huge workload, time-consuming and laborious. With the increasing number and types of invoices, the processing becomes more complicated.
After applying RPA:
The RPA robot automatically enters the invoice data into the ERP system, simplifying the operation process, and saving 10 minutes of processing time for each invoice. RPA's invoice reading function can automatically detect and mark invoices that are suspected of being wrong or fraudulent, improving accuracy and minimizing business risks. The RPA robot can automatically process nearly 50,000 invoices for the agency each year, saving more than 6,000 hours of work.
2. Invoice issuance
Industry: Communications
Financial department of a telecom operator
Before applying RPA:
After receiving the order, the financial staff needs to manually enter the relevant information and issue an invoice, and send it to the customer by email. Manual invoicing takes a long time, and when the business volume is large, the financial staff may even cause data entry errors due to fatigue.
After applying RPA:
RPA automatically generates an electronic invoice for the customer and sends it to the customer's email address. If the customer has a paper invoice request, RPA will send the invoice information to the printer. In case of a disputed invoice, the information is automatically transferred to manual processing. RPA optimizes the billing process, shortens the billing time, and improves the billing accuracy.
3. Invoice verification
Industry: IT/Internet
For the finance of a technology company, check invoices and related transaction records.
Before applying RPA:
Hundreds of invoices have to be checked every day, and each employee has to spend at least 1 hour sorting out paper documents, which is time-consuming, laborious, and error-prone.
After applying RPA:
RPA digitizes paper materials through OCR and archives them uniformly. Without human intervention, RPA can automatically check invoices and transaction records, enter data, and store scanned images.
4. Invoice recognition
Industry: Manufacturing
Finance department of an automobile manufacturing company
Before applying RPA:
The Finance Department employs multiple financial personnel to manually process paper invoices and bills from suppliers in various regions. The workload is heavy, data entry is prone to errors, and novices may even be unfamiliar with the business and lead to compliance risks.
After applying RPA:
RPA uses OCR technology to identify invoice information in multiple formats, convert it a second time, form a unified format, automatically enter the system, and then send the processed invoice information to the designated financial personnel for review.
5. Supplier invoice processing
Industry: Retail
A toy retailer
Before applying RPA:
Whenever a new store joins the company’s purchasing group, the company collects every invoice from the supplier and centrally processes all transactions. Invoices received at the beginning of the month are small and the business volume is small, but a large number of invoices have to be processed near the end of the month. Manual processing is inefficient, not only time-consuming and labor-intensive, but also prone to errors or omissions.
After applying RPA:
RPA processes more than 100,000 invoices for the company every year. It used to be handled by 45 employees, but now it can be handled by only 15 people, greatly reducing labor costs.
03
Invoice automation
With the popularization and application of RPA, the manual labor problem in the financial process is being solved. "Invoice automation" is bound to become an important choice for many companies' financial departments to apply RPA to achieve process automation.
According to the various pain points caused by enterprise financial invoice processing, the UB Store "invoice automation" automatic office solution covers common financial scenarios: invoice issuance, identification, summary, verification, tax declaration/tax report preparation, etc., to help enterprises achieve batch invoices The automation of collection, data entry, etc. improves the efficiency of data collection and management, reduces corporate manpower and material resources, and improves accuracy.
Invoice verification robot: Use OCR to automatically identify invoice information, and automatically visit the website of the State Administration of Taxation to verify the authenticity of the invoice, and finally enter the invoice information and verification results into Excel.
VAT invoice recognition robot: Automatically recognize and summarize VAT invoices in various formats, and have the ability to recognize other types of tickets.
Invoice information summary robot: used to collect invoice information in PDF, JPG and other image formats, including invoice code, invoice number, invoice date, amount, tax, etc.
Invoice details are automatically migrated across systems at regular intervals: The robot automatically exports the sales invoice details and imports them into the enterprise's own invoice management ERP system.