Intelligent invoice processing: How to choose the right technology provider?
The field of intelligent invoice processing has seen remarkable expansion in recent years, diversifying with the emergence of many providers offering technological solutions. These technologies vary in complexity and efficiency, ranging from simple invoice digitization solutions to complex systems based on Artificial Intelligence, promising complete automation of invoice processing workflows.
Read more about: What is intelligent invoice processing?
The current wave of massive investments in the development and implementation of AI technologies has a clear positive impact in the field of intelligent invoice processing. However, this impact is limited by several factors:
- Confidentiality of commercial and financial data
- The need for high accuracy in processing
- Lack of familiarity of solution providers with challenges in the financial-accounting field
Limitations in intelligent invoice processing
1. Confidentiality of commercial and financial data
Invoice data is confidential, so access to this data for training AI engines is often restricted. Moreover, in large companies, confidentiality is enforced not just for external access, but also internally. According to the principle of least privilege (PoLP), users should have access only to the data and resources necessary for completing their own tasks, no more.
Furthermore, AI engines must understand and apply these confidentiality concepts throughout their lifecycle – from training and validation to testing and production.
2. High accuracy in processing
Financial accounting data requires a high degree of processing accuracy – any processing error generated using Artificial Intelligence can inevitably lead to manual reprocessing, thus diminishing the efficiency anticipated at the implementation of the AI solution.
In the field of Artificial Intelligence, there is always a battle between the generalization power of algorithms and their accuracy. Applying this challenge to the financial sector, the requirements for accuracy are more rigorous, involving not just arithmetic precision, but also correct interpretation from an accounting, statutory, and managerial perspective.
Inaccuracies in invoice processing can have severe and direct consequences for clients:
- Double-paid invoices affect cash flow
- Commercially unvalidated invoices lead to undue payments or the blocking of legitimate payments, thus affecting supplier relations
- Incorrectly recorded and declared invoices attract penalties from fiscal authorities
3. Lack of familiarity of AI solution providers with the challenges of the financial-accounting sector
With AI technologies available immediately and at almost no cost, anyone can develop a proof-of-concept that recognizes and reads invoices. However, there is a significant difference between simply reading invoices and creating a complex platform capable of processing a large volume of diverse invoices with remarkably high accuracy.
This difference is visible in two main areas:
- Technical capabilities of the platform – security of the platform, its scalability, speed of learning and processing, accuracy of processing, ability of the platform to quickly interconnect with your financial accounting systems
- Expertise and empathy of the team – the financial background of the founders, the team’s experience in solving your specific invoice-related problems, success in solving similar issues for other clients. Simply reading invoices is not enough; this is a basic level of competence that you can achieve on your own.
Criteria for evaluating the capabilities of an intelligent invoice processing provider
To ensure the success of your automatic invoice processing project, we recommend evaluating providers based on the following considerations:
Expertise of the implementation team
In addition to the technical capability to implement libraries of Artificial Intelligence algorithms, we recommend carefully assessing the ability of the provider’s team to understand the specific problems you face and demonstrate that they can find effective solutions for them:
- Request a demonstration session in which you evaluate the processing flow with your own documents;
- Ask specific questions and evaluate the team’s response;
- Understand the provider’s support infrastructure and its technical and business capabilities;
- Ask for references from clients with a profile similar to yours;
- Evaluate the team’s maturity – an experienced team that understands the technical complexity of the proposed solutions will be wary of promising perfect and universal results. Moreover, a mature team will be transparent regarding technical limitations, so you can set realistic expectations not just in terms of results, but also the effort required from your internal team.
Technological maturity of the platform
A technically mature platform is characterized by:
- High availability of infrastructure in a reputable public cloud
- Well-established Disaster Recovery procedures
- Rigorous information security procedures, documented and available on request; the existence of ISO certifications is a good indicator of the seriousness with which the team approaches the subject
- A coherent design interface, a testimony to the team’s attention to ease of use and communication of functionalities
- A robust back-end platform that offers multiple configuration options to customize the solution, without the need for complex and risky developments
- Well-managed and controlled development, testing, and production implementation processes
- A complete API interface that enables integration to Customers’ systems according to their own security requirements
Performance parameters of the platform
Request details about the platform’s performance:
- Document processing speed – because you want to save time
- Accuracy of processing – because you do not want to reprocess documents that have already been managed by the system
- Volume and variability of processed documents – because a large and diversified volume of documents suggests that the platform can effectively cover your specific problems without requiring additional costly and lengthy training
Why choose Profluo as your future solution for intelligent document processing?
By exploring automatic invoice processing options with a competent provider, you can transform how your business manages financial operations. To this regard, Profluo provides:
- A team with an average of over 20 years of experience in the financial-accounting area and in software development
- A robust portfolio of Enterprise clients and deep exposure in large accounting firms
- Over 2 million real invoices processed and over 30 million accounting notes posted automatically
- A personalized approach to Artificial Intelligence algorithms
- Deep understanding of invoices, including their commercial, fiscal, and accounting context
- Intelligent anticipation of invoice operator workflows
- High and flexible security with role-based access, multi-tenant architecture for clients, and a proprietary authorization system
- Agile architecture that allows custom installations to match the specific needs of each company
- Integrations with most local and global ERPs and accounting systems
- Immediately available technology in an international context: multilingual portal, machine learning algorithms that progressively form specialized vocabularies in detected languages
We invite you to request a free demo to see how our solution can help you optimize your financial-accounting processes, while protecting your data and accessing innovative technologies!
