Automated data extraction and processing of accounts payable invoices, expense claims and statement reconciliation using oasis ap
The Challenge
This popular and successful restaurant franchise has over 270 outlets across Australia. Over 3,000 expense invoices were processed manually either as paper or emailed copies.
The company’s finance team was keen to provide automation and a workflow solution that would significantly reduce the workload and the time (as well as labour cost) to process corporate operational expense invoices. All extracted data was to be uploaded directly to their finance system.
The company, after investigating a number of solutions, decided to implement OASIS AP for its additional capability to automate the workflow for invoice processing. OASIS AP provided the granularity and flexibility the company needed to process their expense invoices.
Problem Statement
The company analysed and processed expense invoices manually. The volume of invoices is up to 3,000 expense invoices a month including over 7,000 invoice line items.
The invoice could be paper-based but the majority were received via email. The company had four people working full time to process invoices manually and the process did not provide the information that the leadership team needed. They wanted to know if what was invoiced had been ordered (exact description, quantities, prices, etc).
They also wanted to verify that the goods or services had been received and if they had received exactly what they ordered or something slightly different. They also wanted to be able to have credit notes flowing back to the finance system in cases where goods had been only partially received.
The Solution
OASIS AP extracts data with over 99% accuracy in the summary invoice information and also provides line item data extraction. With highly flexible workflows able to automate different rules for different invoice lines, OASIS AP provides the ability to approve an invoice at the line item level which the company needed in order to differentiate between line items, that would include services to different restaurant outlets but coming from the same supplier.
It allowed the company to allocate the expense to each outlet automatically rather than having staff manually searching for the information.
The Execution
The implementation of OASIS AP allowed the company to extract and analyse data from mismatched invoices with both accuracy and efficiency.
The seamless upload of the data to their Finance system meant that no additional training was needed for staff to use the solution. The extraction, business rules, workflows, and exceptions are dealt with prior to entering the Finance system.
The Results
The ability to handle complex workflows allowed the team to automate the extraction and processing of invoices for suppliers with one cost centre and one expense line item, suppliers with invoices coded to multiple expense types and only one cost centre, suppliers with automated exception profiles (needing manual intervention) and suppliers where invoices can be coded to multiple cost centres and multiple expense types.
