Invoices Processing Solution (IPS)
Automate your Invoices, Purchase Orders and Quotes processing.
The chances are that your Accounts Payable department receives thousands of invoices, purchase orders and similar documents by post, fax and email. Each paper or file document should be manually opened or printed, then manually entered into the system. It's a lengthy, resource-hungry process that adds little value. Worse still, time and costs can escalate when invoices arrive without the correct information or errors are added during the keying process, taking up hours of administration time to unpick. Then there's the growing cost of storing paper documents. Manual accounts payable processing can costs up to $10 per invoice and this cost can rise alarmingly due to errors.
The SiMX Invoices Processing Solution will minimizes the processing costs, increase productivity, free your employees from unproductive, tedious work and significantly reduce or eliminate errors. It will take care of the complete cycle of feeding data from all types of incoming documents into your internal systems by implementing the following workflow steps:
Obtaining the incoming documents (delivered via email, FTP, or web).
Analyzing the documents contents and passing them through the OCR processing if needed.
Detecting the specific document formatting types and determining which pre-configured project should be used for the data extraction.
Locating, recognizing and extracting the relevant data from the input files.
Verifying the extracted data, converting and structuring it.
Load the extracted data into the destination database.
Generating reports and sending them to the involved parties.
The solution also offers a web portals for monitoring and controlling the processing as well as providing the online access to interactive executive, performance, and exception reports.
Data Retrieval
The incoming invoices, purchase orders, quotes, etc. arrive in a variety of formats including PDF, Word, Excel, HTML, CSV, or text files. Usually, they are delivered via email, FTP, Web uploads or downloads, but in some cases they could come in as paper documents via postal service. The SiMX solution supports all of these delivery channels offering all the necessary means for automating the data retrieval process.
The dedicated email processing components provide access to the Outlook, Exchange, POP3, IMAP, and any other client specific email protocols. The FTP component will let you easily automate files retrieval from the remote locations via the FTP and SFTP protocols. The set of dedicated web API and web scraping components will let you access virtually any data accessible via internet.
All the delivered files will be stored in the dedicated "Raw" folder. The paper documents should be scanned and the generated files (usually PDF) placed into the same folder. The system watches that folder an processes files on arrival. The first step of files processing logs them into the system making further processing much more transparent and manageable.
Data Extraction (Reconstruction)
Typically, invoices, quotes and purchase orders are coming in a big variety of different layouts, which makes it especially important to be able to easily add support for new document formats and layouts. SiMX solution addresses this issue by offering a well-organized simple technique based on the usage of a state-of-the-art data extraction component SiMX TextConverter.
TextConverter enables building data parsing and extraction projects in a matter of hours regardless of the input documents complexity. Its intrinsic features accumulate more than 20 years of data extraction experience thus guaranteeing fast and reliable results. Artificial Intelligence and preset data extraction functions ensure agile and rapid project development.
As soon as the data parsing project is configured, it takes a just few simple steps to integrate the newly created TextConverter project into the main data processing workflow.
Data Reconciliation
The newly extracted data always needs additional massaging. Database lookups to find existing references, suppressing duplicates, building cross references, consolidation new and existing records – all that is accomplished by SiMX database transformers. Those are visual components which do not require understanding of programming languages and database technologies, thus allowing much faster development than traditional tools. The most common processing functionality includes:
All automated workflows can be controlled, viewed and edited over the web, allowing your management, analysts and customers access to the processes and processing results from anywhere anytime.
Search, analyze, and edit the processed data
Create reports and forms personalized for your customers and present them online
Have separate portals for executives, analysts and clients
Increase the efficiency of quality control, information observability, results delivery
The scope of web functionality is limitless, from quality assurance to process control, to interactive web reporting and client specific features. SiMX application development suite provides the unique ability to build web applications and user interfaces without programming or web development skills.
Reporting
Output reports and forms customized for your requirements and needs of your clients, performance and executive reports, reports refactoring – all that is easily achievable with SiMX Target Reports and Free Form Reports components. Intuitive user interface, canned templates, unmatched layout flexibility and reporting variety facilitate design of complex output forms and reports in a matter of hours, precisely to the client’s specifications.