The Account Payables team is one of the busiest in any enterprise. Taking the stacks of invoices daily and entering the data manually for 1000s of invoices into the accounting system per month is time-consuming, but a task that needs to be done, nonetheless. Excel templates have been a preferred way for bulk invoicing by enterprises for years. Excel provides basic structures that are easy to use and understand, but it can also be very limiting and may not always meet the specific needs of the AP teams. Learn more about how to automate invoice in excel.
Excel for Accounts Payable - Invoice Processing
The most significant benefit of using an invoice excel format is the consistency in structure and format. Organizations send out the same-patterned invoices to multiple customers, and Excel has proven to be reliable over time in this regard. Sending the same structured invoice every time makes it easier for AP teams to process and make payments faster. This traditionally has been how excel was used across accounts payable and excel formulas were used to perform calculations.
Excel is considered somewhat of a gold standard in the finance industry, and basically, every enterprise is using it in some capacity. There is a lot of domain expertise inside and outside the organizations to lean on that can help the AP teams to figure out how to do most operations related to invoice processing. Since Excel has such widespread adoption, there are plenty of pre-made templates for accounts payable and formulas that users can leverage for their AP processes. Automating invoice processing in Excel has multiple benefits for the enterprise – reduces cycle time, saves costs, and increases productivity.
Learn More about Invoice Processing Automation.
Challenges of Accounts Payable - Invoice Processing with Excel
Manual Entry - When using Excel for invoice processing, AP staff are involved in many manual data entry activities. This is tedious and prone to errors. It’s also challenging for a human to be 100% accurate when keying in data manually.
Poor collaboration and version control - Although Excel offers some collaboration and multi-user editing features, it has several flaws. If several users are collaborating, only one user can edit at a time. Ensuring proper access and ensuring access control is also a challenge. Teams often end up with multiple versions of their invoice tracking spreadsheet. When this happens, it takes more time to go back and figure out what was edited and updated and reconcile to the most up-to-date version.
Limited integrations - Although there are add-ons available, Excel isn’t designed for seamless integrating with other financial systems like ERP. Compare this with the out-of-the-box integrations of Account Payable automation software that can connect via API seamlessly.
Scalability - This is perhaps the biggest issue with using Excel for invoice management. Once the enterprise grows to a point where your Account Payables department is processing hundreds of invoices daily, this solution simply does not work. In some scenarios, enterprises use a single excel with one or more-line items that can correspond to a single invoice. Such excel files can easily have up to 5000-line items where each line item may correspond to a single invoice.
CFO Guide to AI-driven AP Invoice Automation – “Recession proof your business” Business leaders always need to accommodate unfavorable circumstances and recalibrate their business strategy. The way most CFOs achieves it is by keeping technology investments at the center. Strategic investments in cutting-edge technology can become a driving force for all business operations. This E-Book talks about how the CFOs (Chief Financial Officers) can become change agents for their business, reduce operational costs, and make them recession-proof by adopting cutting-edge technology products.
Generate Accounts Payable - Invoices from excel sheets with Kanverse
Kanverse Account Payable Invoice Automation for Excel makes the extraction, validation and processing of excel invoices seamless, hassle free and quick for your business. Kanverse automates the processes based on invoices based on invoice number. With Kanverse, you can process any kind of batch invoices from excel automatically. Simply upload the excel file through any of the available channels and let Kanverse create the invoices in your ERP system automatically. Kanverse gives you the power to save time with AI powered automation of bulk invoices processing in excel.
Learn more about the role of AI in AP invoice processing. The Kanverse E-Book talks about the five most important roles played by Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology enterprises should be mindful of before considering automating invoice processing.
Multi-channel support with auto classification - Multi-channel document import with auto-classification, > 99.5% extraction accuracy
Automatic Validation of data - Real time validation – check for missing GL Codes, Validate PO, missing fields etc.
Excel-like UI for Error Correction - Intuitive Excel editor-like UI for easy corrections and fixes. Generate a new excel file with the corrections. The original excel file is also kept for records.
Collaboration with team members for faster processing - Collaborate with team members and cross-functional team members in real-time. See each other’s changes while editing the excel files.
Low Code Business Rule Framework - Use Kanverse’s built-in rules or design custom rules with ease
Auto-Publish - Easy configuration to publish your records all at once or partially
Support for a single excel file that may correspond to Bulk (1000s of) invoices – Kanverse processes such excel files and handles one or more-line items as unique invoices. Kanverse provides highly scalable architecture to support bulk upload into ERP systems.
Easy Configurations & Integrations - One time set up for your Excel files -define primary keys. map Excel to ERP fields etc.
Audit & Compliance - Publish history of actions, the original and the corrected excel file to ERP and link it with the Invoice record
About Kanverse.ai
Kanverse brings you the best-in-class IDP software to automate submission intake process for Insurers right from ingestion, classification, extraction, validation to filing. Extract data from a wide gamut of documents with up to 99.5% accuracy using its multi-stage AI engine. Say goodbye to manual entry, reduce cycle time to seconds, optimize cost by up to 80%, minimize human error, and turbocharge productivity of your team.
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About the Author
Kingshuk Ghosh, Principal Product Manager, Kanverse.ai