Automating your accounts department

There are lots of fantastic integration opportunities available to help you increase the efficiency of your print business, but one area that often gets overlooked is the accounts department. But don’t let this area escape your attention - there’s plenty of scope for automation in this part of your business too. In this article we’re going to look at how you can automate the processing of purchase orders and supplier invoices.

When you’re doing this manually, you typically raise a purchase order on your MIS and, when the supplier sends over their invoice, your accounts team will manually match them up and enter the appropriate information into the accounts software. But by integrating your MIS to other solutions like V1 Document Scanning, you can remove this manual work and automate the whole process instead.

How does V1 Document Scanning work?

Automated invoice scanning is a pretty simple process, here’s how it works:

1. All electronic supplier invoices come into a designated email address. Any paper invoices that come in via the mail can be scanned by a member of your team instead. 
   
2. V1 Document Scanning will read the digital invoices and detect the invoice address and other relevant data then convert it into XML format.
   
3. This data is then automatically pushed into your MIS, which matches the purchase order with the supplier invoice.
   
4. The MIS will then push the invoices through to the accounts software, ready for payment.

What happens if the invoices don’t match?

Occasionally the matching process will fail, in which case errors will get flagged in an error report. In this scenario, a human will need to get involved to identify the problem and fix it within the V1 software. Once this is done, the MIS will take over and push the invoice to the accounts software.

If you find yourself generating lots of purchase orders or processing lots of supplier invoices, integrations like this will definitely save you lots of time and make you more efficient - We’re sure your accounts department will thank you for that!