How to Eliminate ‘PDF Fatigue’ When Processing B2B Payouts

Even amid the great digital shift and the overall trend of invoice automation, companies — specifically accounts payable (AP) teams — are suffering from PDF fatigue.

Routable CEO Omri Mor told Karen Webster that many companies seeing an increased demand for payouts — thousands of them, where payments can wend their way across the globe — are still grappling with manual oversight on invoice data entry.

No matter how innovative these companies may be, they’re still jousting with some rather archaic processes as they interact up and down supply chains. Vendors are still sending PDFs — thousands of them, each month.

And given the rate at which some companies are growing, he said, “If someone is receiving 4,000 PDFs today, well, they’re going to receive 10,000 PDFs tomorrow.”

To help address the deluge of invoices, many companies are paying third-party services for their invoice extraction technology or hiring overseas data entry teams to transcribe that data into back-end systems or matching the data manually with PDFs, he said. Thus, they’re seeing transcription fatigue — not to mention the fact that, with those teams in place, the cost of processing the payments goes up, sometimes by as much as $10 (fees can be charged by page).

The Benefits of OCR

Optical character recognition (OCR) can solve some of the problems extant in data collection and extraction, but those solutions have typically been geared toward smaller firms that have only a couple of dozen invoices per month, Mor said. For those relatively smaller invoice processing tasks, the typical extraction has been vendor due date, invoice date and amount due. That simply won’t cut it for high-volume payout activities.

The issue has been how to offer OCR at scale, to get data “off” the invoices for verticals managing high-volume payments, where having an automatic (proverbial) paper trail is critical when matching purchase orders.

OCR — newly available from Routable and geared toward its mid-market and enterprise B2B clients — is an enhancement within invoice processing that reduces errors for mass payouts and accelerates invoice processing times, he said. The introduction shines a light on some of the pain points being felt within the B2B space and represents a bit of an extension of Routable’s go-to-market strategy.

“Our customers are typically coming to us stating, ‘I need to solve making a thousand business payments a month,’ and early on we didn’t think OCR was important to those customers,” he said.

That’s because those companies were busy converting CSV files to create bill payments, or they needed application programming interfaces (APIs) in place to enhance data connectivity to meet the payments demands of the gig economy.

The Mechanics and the Benefits

In terms of the mechanics of the OCR offering, the solution allows firms to create new payables by uploading invoices to Routable. Mor said the OCR offering also automatically extracts data from invoices uploaded to automatically populate new payables with vendor information, payment amounts and other invoice data.

By adding OCR to the Routable platform, all the data generated syncs with QuickBooks Online, Xero, Oracle NetSuite and Sage Intacct, so invoicing details are automatically recorded in enterprise accounting software, in real time.

For the firms making the payments themselves, he said, there’s the added benefit of increasing the payout efficiencies, as pre-filled bill details cut down on manual coding efforts.

And with that reduction in time juggling PDFs, finance teams can focus on higher value activities related to financial planning and the usual month end close, he said.

The client experience improves the longer they use the Routable system, he told Webster (via machine learning and high-tech models).

OCR remains a work in progress, he said, noting that there will always be situations where exceptions demand some human oversight. But the OCR offering is flexible enough so that corporate controllers can dictate how documents can be formatted and synched to enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.

“OCR helps reduce the amount of time a person has to do data entry and has to review, but I still do think that having that internal review is still a really critical part of scale,” Mor told Webster, adding that client firms can save “thousands of dollars a month removing that data entry service.”