Invoice Processing solution

Solution Guides

Enhance your accounts payable operations with secure and automated invoice processing management

June 5, 20246 mins
Man in tie looking at a laptop

Automate your invoice processing

Challenge

For accounts payable (AP) professionals, efficiency and accuracy are paramount. You need to process invoices quickly, remit payments promptly, and manage both to optimize cash flow—all while avoiding errors that could have a long-term impact on the business. But with paper-based and digital invoices sent to multiple locations and inboxes, efficiency and accuracy are a real challenge.

Impact

If you have invoices in multiple email inboxes, filing cabinets, hard drives, data shares, and so on, you’re missing out on the power of technology to help you do your job more efficiently and accurately. With 70% of enterprises still receiving paper invoices,1 finding and manually reviewing hundreds of pieces of paper to match invoices for payment can lead to late payments that damage supplier relationships and your organization’s credit rating.

Manually entering data from paper invoices introduces the risk of manual errors or lost invoices. Duplicate payments alone can cost your organization from .8% to 2% of your total payments.2 Simple keying errors can also lead to overpayments, duplicate payments, missed payments, and late payments and leave the door open for fraud.

Inefficiency both slows down payment processing and incurs unnecessary costs. Manually processing an invoice takes 17 business days on average.3 And, according to the Federal Reserve, of the more than 25 billion invoices sent annually, 75% require manual processing, which costs U.S. businesses approximately $200 billion every year.4

What if you could

Automating invoice processing with Iron Mountain Invoice Processing can help you overcome your challenges, to:

  1. Centralize invoice intake across physical and email invoices
  2. Leverage the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to use intelligent data capture to extract invoice data from paper and digital records helping reduce manual tasks and errors
  3. Automate process workflows, integrating supplier invoice records and procurement data and empower decision makers

Iron Mountain Invoice Processing

Iron Mountain Invoice Processing is built on Iron Mountain InSight® Digital Experience Platform (DXP), a scalable, low-code software as a service (SaaS) solution that strengthens the information management capabilities drives automation of manual tasks in your existing AP ecosystem via pre-built connectors, workflows, document types, metadata, retention rules, and AI prompts.

You can trust Iron Mountain, a global business dedicated to the storage, protection, and management of information and assets, to provide a solution that leverages comprehensive physical and digital content management, AI, workflow automation and information governance capabilities in a unified platform to help you:

  • Centralize Invoice Management across physical and email formats: You can digitize your own invoices, or Iron Mountain can pick up and digitize it for you. Suppliers can also send invoices to dedicated AP email inboxes. Our solution provides a single repository for your physical and digital records.
  • Automate Data Capture using the solution's Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) capabilities: Our solution automatically extracts and indexes invoice header and line item data - giving your AP operators a complete digital record without manual data keying.
  • Connect data across platforms: Integration with existing procurement systems connects information to break down information silos.
  • Enable anytime, anywhere access: Authorized users can easily access and search invoices on our secure ECM platform via a single web-based portal, get notified for exception-handling rules, and share and reprocess rejected invoices with vendors.
  • Protect your business: Auditable chain of custody, secure storage, data encryption, access restriction, and role-based permissions keep data safe. Our content platform complies with industry standards and data-retention policies and provides capabilities that help you respond to audits and discovery requests.
  • Manage the entire life cycle: Iron Mountain can dispose of physical records by securely storing or shredding them or returning them to you.

The results can significantly impact your bottom line, helping you:

  • Make invoice processing more transparent: Centrally view, manage, and process invoices from a single, user-friendly portal. See how each invoice was handled and where your payments are going with just a click.
  • Increase accuracy: Automatically extract invoice information and feed it into workflows to avoid errors resulting from manual data entry. Reduce or eliminate the risk of misplacing or mishandling invoices.
  • Increase efficiency and reduce costs: With digitization and workflow automation, you can sort and organize invoices with a few keystrokes for lightning-fast processing. You’ll also save the time and excess labor of monthly close.

1 CPA Practice Advisor, 7 Ways Intelligent Document Processing Helps Accounting, July 2022.
2 Office of the Washington State Auditor, Paying vendors twice is a problem. SAO offers tips to prevent duplicate payments, February 2022.
3 CXOtoday, The need for Automated Invoicing solution in Expense Management function, April 2023.
4 The Federal Reserve, Modernizing B2B Payments: The Time for Digitalization is Now, accessed May 2023.

Industry fact

Intelligent document processing can increase invoice processing speeds by over 67%.

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