Most manufacturing companies need to procure materials and services from hundreds of external vendors. These invoices come in numerous layouts, and entering details from these to the ERP is often a nightmare for companies.
Some outsource the invoice data entry job to 3rd parties. Others utilize their own internal resources for the purpose. Either way, this is a time consuming and effort-intensive activity.

With the introduction of electronic invoices (e-Invoices), the Government of India standardized the format for Business to Business (B2B) Invoices and made this mandatory for companies with an annual turnover larger than 100 Crores (lowered to 50 Crores with effect from 01 Apr 2021). With this, the manual data entry for inbound invoices can be totally eliminated. But for this, they need a software that can seamlessly receive the signed e-Invoice acknowledgements from the vendors, and pull the validated line items for these from the GSTN portal.

A few solutions are available in the market that can semi-automate the processing of inbound invoices. These use technologies like Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Machine Learning (ML) to extract the relevant fields from inbound invoices in PDF or image formats. However, these solutions are not widely implemented in the industry, probably due to unacceptable level of errors in the extraction process.

It is in the above context that IVL took on the challenge. We went on to design a solution that surmounts the technological hurdles of extracting field values from invoices and other external documents. The terms of reference used while planning the product were as under

• Not prohibitively costly to implement and run
• The same solution must handle both electronic and PDF invoices
• Near 100% extraction accuracy for e-Invoices and for PDF invoices (this latter needs to be “trained” for each vendor layout)
• Friendly User Interface for training new vendor invoices that can be used even by non-technical users
• 30% to 60% extraction accuracy for PDF Invoices of unfamiliar (“untrained”) layouts, thus reducing the manual effort by limiting this to train only the remaining fields with errors

What is more, in case the ERP used is SAP, IVL offers a SAP Certified Add-on product that PARK/ POST the extracted fields of inbound invoices at the ERP

Automatic processing of Invoices is a priority activity now with most of the customers as manual data entry leads to transactional errors and getting wrong data captured in the system.

Invoice processing automation tool (Ideck) enables organizations to automate and stream line the processing of supplier invoices. It automatically extracts information from any incoming invoice, validates data and transfers it to your ERP (SAP) system. The system validates data in the Invoices against already created Goods receipt, Purchase order etc., highlights discrepancies (if any) and post the data automatically to your ERP(SAP) system( If data matches).

• Fully automated solution with faster processing
• Level verification on Invoice processing (Validate, Park and Post) with SAP
• Comparison of Invoice data with GR data and highlight discrepancies (if any).
• Preview of Invoices along with extracted value to ensure correct values getting processed.
• User friendly Dashboards to view statistics on what got processed, Pending and Rejected. It will also showcase Aging Invoices, Vendor wise reports, to do list of a particular user etc.
• Flexibility for in cooperating custom business validations at MIRO, Parking or Posting level.
• Automatic generation of monthly auditing report for processed invoices.
• Provision for keeping replica of Master data like vendor contract, supporting documents etc against each vendor securely within the tool for faster processing.
• Single window solution for all Invoice documents whether it is E-Invoice, Hard copy Invoices or Softcopy Invoices.
• Option to send documents automatically to ERP(SAP-Content server if available) .