Home appliances leader improves financial auditing compliance with automated invoice reconciliation system

Home Appliance Manufacturing

Industry

$10 - $50 Billion

REVENUE

10,000+

EMPLOYEES

This created several challenges

As part of the reconciliation process, the finance department had to manually process thousands of transaction-based invoices every month. For the remittance entry of invoices, they reconciled every invoice with the respective sale and payment made by dealers.

The process was time consuming and error prone as every invoice contained few hundred items to be validated manually

The global nature of their business also created additional country-specific complications for their invoicing process

The manual and inefficient invoicing and accounts receivable (AR) processes resulted in extended cycle times, large AR backlog with an increased risk of revenue loss due to possible human error

Managing the discrepancies between invoices and purchase orders and their reconciliation also became extremely complicated

The client wanted to streamline their global invoicing process and was looking for a partner who could build an optimal automation solution for their invoice reconciliation process involving multiple enterprise systems.

Our experts jumped in

Emtec Digital’s Intelligent Automation team recommended a cutting-edge, custom developed solution utilizing the latest Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Machine Learning (ML) tools. The client’s entire invoice processing flow and potential scenarios were analyzed to ensure an efficient and user-friendly solution with improved cycle time and accuracy.

In the new automated process

The product and payment details are extracted from the invoice document and matched against the purchase order in the ERP system. The invoice is then marked as fully /partially paid / advance payment under the account. The solution is designed with the following capabilities:

Trigger a bot for executing the invoice processing workflow at fixed intervals

Complete the transaction with an acceptable variance or trigger an error message for transactions that fall outside the variance limits

Identify excess payment amounts and add it to the dealer account as an advance payment against future invoices

Process invoices received via email in the form of spreadsheets, email text, PDF or image. An Optical Character Recognition (OCR) module intelligently extracts client details and invoice data and then maps the data to associated fields in the ERP system

Validate legitimacy of email contents based on predefined policies and decide if it should be processed

Execute automated workflows for reconciliation and closure, including common exceptions

Generate a report of unprocessed invoices for the finance team to process manually

The results were promising

The automated invoice reconciliation solution utilizing custom developed RPA workflows operates 24x7 enabling higher productivity, better process control, rapid invoice processing and improved turnaround time. The client’s manual end-to-end invoice processing has now been transformed into a well-defined, automated and rule-based process for error-free invoice reconciliation. This RPA solution has also helped the client free up critical finance resources for more strategic tasks directly related to revenue recognition and business forecasting.