If in the past options such as full invoice automation were not possible, today such conveniences are just at our fingertips, and we have full access to them. Working with documents can be very tedious and difficult at times, which makes it difficult for the employees in the accounting department significantly.

Instead of devoting time to solving critical situations and problems at work, they waste unnecessary time sorting, classifying, data mining and analyzing information obtained from invoices, bills of lading, contracts and others. However, all this can be prevented with the help of intelligent software such as that of smart software, with the help of which the process of processing invoices is optimized and rationalized and not only.

Is automatic invoice processing possible and how does it happen?

For a given business to be successful, the accounting department in the company must function well, otherwise serious financial mistakes can be made that reflect negatively on the company’s reputation. Automatic document processing is a technology that was developed to ease the accounting process in small and large companies. With its help, working with documents is maximally simplified, and data extraction does not take so much time for employees and their managers.

If until a few years ago the reception and analysis of information was only possible through the manual intervention of people, today this entire process can be guided by artificial intelligence. The stages in the processing of accounts payable are simplified as much as possible, the efficiency of employees is significantly improved, and the export of the document to the financial system is optimized.

However, it is good to know that during automatic invoice processing there are also some challenges that can be overcome through features such as machine learning. Pattern recognition also helps improve software that is being used by more and more companies to improve company accounting and business relationships.

Stages during the process

The reception and digitization of documents are two stages that are vital for the correct processing of company invoices. Here is more information about them:

• receiving documents – the processing of physical documents can be fully automated by converting them to the digital format. For this purpose, a special technology designed for scanning is used, and in this way, the processing of a large volume of documents becomes completely possible. It is recommended to bet on color scanning of documents, which is not mandatory, but it is good to use it to make the data extraction process more efficient;
• processing electronic invoices and emails – your e-mail can now be connected to the automatic invoice processing software, which improves the accounting automation process. It is important to configure a new email to receive the invoices – this way the system will recognize the incoming information and extract the necessary details. In this case, you can work with different formats such as GIF, PNG, JPEG, etc.;
• preparation for OCR – preprocessing is very important for optical symbols recognition to be as efficient as possible. This stage includes steps such as correcting the tilt, removing shadows or adjusting the contrast. Thus, the text becomes easy to understand and read, and the subsequent analysis of the document is potentially successful.

In general terms, Smart Soft software can be used to classify different types of documents and extract key data from them, to achieve technology improvement and extensibility. This also explains the wide popularity of the software, which finds application in various business spheres – the technology is suitable both for small companies with a limited number of employees and for large companies with complex structures, where the automation of document processing is a leading goal.

What is OCR (Optical Character Recognition)

As the technology’s name suggests, OCR is a feature that helps people reduce the time it takes to extract information from documents, while also improving accuracy. What are the business benefits? On the one hand, salary costs are reduced, and on the other hand, the company’s reputation is improved, because the risk of human error is minimized.

If you still don’t know what OCR is, it will help you to know that the basic principle is to transform images (scanned documents for example) into data that is readable and easy to edit. In order to carry out such a task, a proper preparation of the document must first be carried out, so that it has a structure that is as clear as possible to the software.

The future extraction of data and their analysis also depends on this – when the existing text is clear, converting it into readable characters will not be defined as a challenge for the software. Finding the text is also part of the process of automatic processing of invoices and not only.

The segmentation of areas containing text symbols is a key point in OCR, and the recognition of individual types of characters is carried out with special algorithms that go through special training and read a large amount of information.