Automate the AP process within your Council
Automated Invoice processing – significantly reduces costs, saves time and improves efficiency across local government accounts departments.
Local councils can process hundreds of thousands of invoices every year and high volumes of paper passing through can prove a serious administrative challenge for local government workers.
Councils are under more pressure than ever to ensure they deal with invoices and payments in a cost efficient and timely manner. Mergers, acquisitions and shared services within the public sector has put more pressure on accounts departments to successfully manage payment information.
There are still around 50% of vendor invoices passing through local government organisations but accounts departments also have to manage email invoices, PDFs Word documents, images, Excel spreadsheets and plain data files such as CSV. By using an automated Invoice processing system automation can help save your business time and money, as well as removing a vast percentage of human error.
What is automated invoice processing?
Automated invoice processing uses data capture to automatically capture and extract the right information from your supplier invoices, interpret the information, validate it and then transfer the information into 
your AP system. They can also deliver superior data extraction results even on unstructured documents capturing all relevant invoice data, including line items, totals and VAT calculations.
Automated accounts payable will enable your business to capture invoices across multiple channels including, paper, fax, email & portal, to ensure efficient control as soon as invoices are received.
It has been proven that with automated invoice processing you can expect savings and reduction in per invoice processing costs in the first year of implementation. Many accounts payable staff are able to process as many paper invoices in one hour as they did in an entire day before using an automated accounts payable system.
Furthermore, advantage can be taken of early settlement discounts, two-way matching to PO’s, three-way matching to PO’s and Goods Received Notes whilst avoiding the costs of late payment penalties.
What are the benefits?
There are many benefits to Councils to having an automated invoice processing system:
- Reduced manual effort in data entry, paper routing, reminders and chasing calls making it faster and less prone to errors or lost invoices
- Better visibility on invoice payments
- Improved staff productivity and satisfaction
- Reduced inbound enquiries
- Improved supplier relationships with faster more accurate resolutions
- Increases security of original documents – documents cannot be lost, damaged or misfiled once scanned and indexed
- Shares documents across teams and locations, while protecting confidential information
- Reduces amount and cost of storage space required
- Increases ability to identify and solve problems earlier
- Reduces operational costs
- Better cash flow forecasting and reduced processing costs
- Full integration with your own accounts systems
The Audit Commission recommended that local authorities facing serious cuts should take the time to review their financial planning and lessen the impact on service users by improving efficiencies such as automated invoice processing. Invoice processing represents the major function for ensuring successful cash flow within authorities and should be viewed as critical for accurate and meaningful budgetary decision making.
With a more automated approach, such as our intelligent Automated Accounts Payable solution, AAC Systems can transform your previous labour-intensive processes into a highly productive and lower cost practice that enhances cash flow and operational efficiency. The perfect solution for public sector organisations seeking a proven, fully scalable, user-friendly solution for automating invoice processing.
