As check payments and remittances increasingly go digital and companies ditch the paper to drive greater efficiency and process control, many have discovered speed bumps along their path to going digital. Unfortunately, for many companies, the transition from check payments, with attached remittances, to electronic payments can potentially lead to tracking/matching challenges that could cause a potential cash application error. The problem is a growing one. Recent studies suggest that as much as 85% of check payments are digitized today.
Historically, paper check processing has been costly and labor-intensive, but offered a clear connection between check and remittance information, facilitating accounting teams to correctly apply payments. In the digital world, without automation or proper processes in place, a scenario where a business cuts a single check to cover multiple invoices, accountings team easily find or match a remittance slip that corresponds to that check and its related invoices so they can divide the payment accordingly.
Unfortunately, digitizing payments can create as disconnect between the check and the remittance statement. Often, the remittance arrives separately, often attached to an email, as a digital download or a mailed paper remittance. In any of these cases, extra work has to be done to track, manage and match the remittance to the check.
By relying on technology that can intelligently capture data from unstructured or semi-structured documents, such as the docAlpha transformation platform from Artsyl Technologies, companies can automated and transform their payables process to manage both native digital payments and digitized paper checks. This allows AP teams to analyze, match and manage all check and remittance-related information without requiring any added hand-holding.
Artsyl’s RemittanceAction is designed to provide an easy-to-implement, pre-configured application that applies intelligent data capture to checks and remittances, supported by automated routing and process reporting. Everything is designed with flexibility and ease of use in mind—precluding the need for any custom coding or heavy IT support.
By digitizing, organizing, matching and automatically tracking invoice, checks and remittances as part of a single process, using a single application, companies can gain control of their payment process while eliminating manual labor, reducing errors, and dramatically reducing costs.
So why is NOW such a good time to automate check remittances and other back office processes? After all, workflow automation has existed for decades. The answer is that today’s solutions incorporate machine learning in a way that lowers the barriers to entry—specifically, the man hours to configure a solution that is flexible enough to function in the real world has been radically reduced.
In the past, data capture solutions that could identify and extract information from documents were reserved for high volume transactions that involved documents of a fairly similar and predictable format.
That’s because these systems required a substantial amount of configuration and/or coding to address changes in document formats, so that onboarding a new vendor could mean reconfiguring or re-coding the system to be able to “read” information like a vendor name or item number.
Those days are long gone, with the advent of systems designed to minimize the time and effort spent by IT personnel as well as process owners to make painstaking changes every time a new invoice, receipt, quote or order format was received.
To address this common challenge, today’s intelligent process automation solutions rely on self-learning data capture to adapt to new inputs based on user interaction. These systems are typically pre-configured to handle 80% or more of the most common document formats and types out of the box, with the ability to adapt their algorithms “on the fly” by monitoring new inputs from human operators.
In this way, IT is relieved of the burden of manual labor by avoiding having to reconfigure the system manually so that it can handle another document type. Instead, the system records user input, then adds that input to its knowledgebase so that it knows what to do the next time it encounters a similar document.
If your company is ready to move beyond the status quo and map out a path towards a more efficient, digital future, NOW is the time to get started. Learn more by visiting the Artsyl Web site. You’ll find a resource center that includes case studies, white papers, videos and more. Next, call or email your Artsyl account manager and request a discovery call to identify the next, best steps on your path towards greater efficiency, transparency and cost savings.