The leadership team identified the ‘Invoice Matching’ process as one that could possibly benefit from automation. However, they were in the early stages of understanding RPA and required support in designing a solution that included automation interventions.

The Accounts Payable (AP) Team receives approximately 200k invoices per year via post, email or e-invoice in paper-based, PDF, or Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) formats. The process of matching and posting invoices to the General Ledger involves many manual tasks prone to human error resulting in late supplier payments, which subsequently impacted their ability to deliver core business operations. Overall, the process held a lot of potential opportunities for automation which would help reduce employee workload and increase efficiency.

The primary focus was initially what was described as an end-to-end process with various bottlenecks. Due to discrepancies originating from various stakeholders involved in the process, there was poor source data for the Accounts Payable Team to process which increased their workload considerably.

Additionally, the Accounts Payable Team was manually communicating across teams to resolve issues instead of maintaining a central database capturing contacts to send requests to. With multiple stakeholders, poorly managed internal databases and lack of definitive rules, information was not efficiently documented. Therefore, obtaining consistent figures across the business for costs and savings proved challenging.