Intelligent Accounts Payable (AP) Automation Software

Learn how using an AP Automation Platform can help you streamline workflows, improve communication, and bring your entire AP process together in one place.

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See AP Automation in Action

 

Your AP team shouldn’t spend all their time chasing down invoices or manually matching purchase orders. And they certainly don’t have the time to spend building and maintaining complicated templates. See how Fortra’s intelligent AP automation solution takes the pain out of complex AP processes to help your team work smarter.

  • Easy to Install: Start processing documents in hours, not days or weeks with simple setup and installation.
  • No Template Building: Custom machine learning algorithms quickly set up previously unseen documents.
  • Easy to Maintain: As your documents change, ML ensures your system is always up-to-date.

See Your AP Invoices in Action

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Why Use AP Automation Software?

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Intelligent AP automation is a great way for any AP department to optimize resources, reduce spend, and put the focus back on more strategic work, especially if any of the following scenarios are relevant to your team:  

  • Your staff is spending too much time on data entry, chasing down invoices, and manually matching POs. 
  • You have a team of programmers spending hours building and maintaining templates. 
  • You’ve tried other accounts payable automation software but the system wasn’t smart enough to capture something if it didn’t know where to look. 
  • Your current solution lacks throughput, so you've stopped using the software as its too inefficient. 

Sound Familiar? Then you need an intelligent accounts payable automation software solution. Get our guide Intelligent AP Automation: Say Goodbye to Template Building to learn how next generation intelligent automation can streamline processes, reduce costs, and gain visibility in your AP department.

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Ways to Use Intelligent AP Automation in Your Business

 
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Automate Report Generation

RPA can interact with accounting systems to automatically generate general ledger and budget reports and share them with key stakeholders.

 
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Intelligent Classification and Capture

Classify and separate multi-page invoices and supporting documents. Leverage OCR capture of relevant data elements like summary and line-item detail to achieve automated invoice processing. 

 
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Integrate with Your ERP

Seamlessly integrate with your ERP or P2P system—like SAP, Syspro, or PeopleSoft—to automate data movement and record keeping while eliminating manual data entry and minimizing end-user training. 

 
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Archiving Invoices

Electronically archive your invoices. Files can then be made available for future use and searched for in a secure single point of storage for all documents.

 
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Data Extraction and Validation

Automatically extract relevant data fields — from machine printed forms to even barcodes. Route forms electronically with the ability to easily output images and data to the correct applications for processing.

 
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Automated Payment Confirmation

Automatically send payment confirmation to vendors once payments have been processed, improving vendor communication and reducing manual effort.

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General Ledger (GL) Identification

Automate finding criteria like vendor, amount, category, etc. to classify payables before posting payment. Use GL business rules for determining how to route AP documents or move data between systems.

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Electronic Purchase Orders and E-Invoicing

Automatically extract data from incoming PO and invoice requests, input the data into the appropriate fields in your order management system, and then validate and submit the orders without human intervention.

Get Common Data From Uncommon Places

There are many ways automation software can capture data to varying degrees. RPA excels at handling data from defined sources. But when more critical thinking is required, you need intelligent document processing to capture and classify more complicated data. Together RPA and IDP can capture virtually all data and help you solve your biggest AP challenges.

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STRUCTURED DATA

Structured data—from a spreadsheet, database, or portal—is organized, clearly defined, and searchable, but represents only about 20 percent of the data in each company. Robotic process automation (RPA) excels at structured or quantitative data automation.

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UNSTRUCTURED DATA

More than 80 percent of all data within organizations is unstructured. Unstructured data—from emails, forms, and invoices—is typically qualitative. It is difficult to interpret and analyze because it has no pre-defined structure. 

What Can You Achieve Using Intelligent RPA in Accounts Payable?

There’s no such thing as a typical invoice. Other capture solutions struggle with invoices that have different formats or multiple pages. But an intelligent AP solution can handle invoices and documents in all types of formats and sizes to give your AP department back time, money, and sanity. With an intelligent AP automation solution you can:

Capture Invoices

the minute they arrive into your organization

Classify Documents

automatically by separating your invoices from supporting documents

Reduce Manual Data Entry

by automatically extracting line-item-detail data elements to share with your ERP

Electronically Route Invoices

for pricing and approval and easily export images and data to your ECM solution

No Template Building

with custom machine learning algorithms, quickly setup previously unseen documents

Manual Visibility & Compliance Controls

allow insight into which invoices are queued for processing and can apply strict controls

FAQs about AP Automation

Intelligent accounts payable automation (AP Automation) is a software solution that uses robotic process automation (RPA), intelligent document processing (IDP), and optical character recognition (OCR), to give invoice processing a boost to save your organization time and money.

By combining process automation with machine learning and AI technology, you can make your structured and unstructured data more usable to streamline labor intensive, manual AP processes.

Yes! The capabilities of our RPA recorder allow users to easily build or record UI interactions—like interacting with portals—and convert those interactions into steps within AP automation workflows.

With Automate, connect directly to your ERP system–like Microsoft Dynamics, Sage, Quickbooks, Netsuite, and more–and other mission-critical applications through APIs or the GUI and create a seamless, end-to-end process.

The time it takes to implement AP automation can vary depending on the complexity of the process and the software being used. However, with Fortra’s Automate, the implementation can often be completed within a few weeks. 

RPA handles rule-based, repetitive tasks while OCR reads, extracts, and converts images such as jpeg, png, pdf, or more, into text for electronic automation and importation. However, OCR is typically regional and needs to be told exactly where to look for a value or field to capture. IDP processes unstructured data by mimicking cognitive abilities like classifying, separating, and extracting data using unassisted ML and AI. With this added intelligence, IDP learns where to look as more types of documents are processed. These three automation tools are valuable on their own, but when combined, they deliver end-to-end AP automation. Learn More >

Yes! AP automation software can also help with accounts receivable (AR) tasks such as invoice generation, payment processing, and collections. IDP can integrate with other software systems such as CRMs or accounting software and automate a variety of AR tasks, such as invoice creation, and data entry.

Yes! Our intelligent capture product can be implemented as a SaaS solution that is easily scaled up or down depending on the needs of the business. Users can easily add additional processes and adjust an AP automation solution to meet their changing needs while still offering cost savings and the flexibility of a cloud-based SaaS solution.

On average, AP invoice processing without automation costs around $8.11 per invoice and takes around 8.8 days. But with automated processing, it averages around $1.51 and takes only 4 hours.

The ROI of AP automation will vary from organization to organization. ROI depends on the number of invoices being processed, the size of your AP department, and other factors. To get an idea of what you might achieve for your ROI, use the AP Automation Savings Calculator to determine how much you could save with AP automation.

Vendors don't interact directly with AP automation software, but the AP automation tools can interact with vendor portals as needed. AP automation software processes vendor data internally for the organization as opposed to interacting directly with the vendor themselves.

Together, robotic process automation and intelligent document processing deliver a smarter way to automate your AP processes. RPA software bots take over the tedious, repetitive processes like monitoring an inbox or entering data into an ERP or other critical applications. All while the robust patented unassisted machine learning engine of IDP eliminates the manual sorting and classification of documents to capture relevant data elements in invoices, credit memos, and more. These drive the core benefits of utilizing an intelligent AP automation solution: 

  • Cost Savings 
    Not only does manually processing invoices cost you time, but it can also lead to costly errors like vendor overcharges, lost or misplaced invoices, and late payments. Accounts payable automation virtually eliminates these problems, saving your organization money. 

  • Improved Response Time 
    Keep clients and vendors satisfied by rapidly minimizing the time between invoice receipt and payment. AP automation automatically captures invoices as soon as they’re received and gets the process completed faster and without errors. 

  • Easier Approvals 
    Automated accounts payable streamlines your approval process with a workflow that automatically gets documents where they need to go. Plus, get a full audit history of when the document was received, signed off on, and passed to the ERP for final processing. 

Request a personalized demo of intelligent AP automation to see how you can streamline your AP processes.

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Looking for an AP automation solution for IBMi? Meet Webdocs for AP, our invoice capture and processing software that delivers AP automation for PO and non-PO based invoice management.