Alongside inbound mail automation, a digital invoice workflow is one of the most important milestones on the road to a paperless office. Instead of missed deadlines, long waiting times during invoice verification or typos during booking, a modern invoice workflow relies on automation and artificial intelligence for process optimization.

Digital invoice workflow in 6 steps:

1. Inbound invoice

If you process your inbox manually, you are still at the very beginning of digitization. Ask your suppliers to deliver invoices digitally only and establish workflows to digitize your inbox.

Ideally, you already receive all invoices digitally or you have established a digitization workflow in the company where every invoice is scanned and stored digitally.

2. Capture the invoice data

Store the digital invoices in your document management system (DMS). There, with the help of an AI, the document classification and data capture takes place. Data from scanned invoices is also captured. The integrated OCR software can read invoice data from image files and store it in a structured way in the DMS.

Digital Invoice Capture with AI replaces manual typing of invoice data into the accounting system, eliminating one of the biggest sources of error in the invoice workflow.

3. Invoice verification

The system takes care of data capture, while the employee is responsible for verifying the invoice. As usual, the invoice contents are checked formally and factually. Missing or incorrect data can be adjusted directly in the system. If there are errors in the mandatory data, the employee triggers the workflow for invoice correction by the supplier.

Incidentally, document classification and data capture enable the system to automatically file the invoice in the correct electronic file. For example, the invoice is filed in the correct supplier file after the supplier's name is read.

4. Invoice approval

After successful invoice verification, the approval workflow begins. Using predefined and individual workflows, the responsible employee automatically receives a task for invoice approval. Several employees can also be involved, for example in the case of particularly large amounts. Depending on the workflow, these employees receive the invoice approval task at the same time or one after the other.

Once approval is granted, the next employee is assigned the task of invoice accounting.

5. Invoice accounting

The DMS should offer an interface to your accounting system. In this way, you avoid a media discontinuity and transfer the invoice data in a structured way to your third-party system, such as SAP.

6. Revision-proof archiving

Invoices are subject to a legal retention period, and a digital archive system that allows for long-term archiving while fulfilling the strict regulations for archiving digital documents is necessary.

The digital invoice workflow only ends when the invoice is automatically deleted.

Digitalize your invoice workflow now

DMS, archiving system, OCR, AI: instead of relying on many individual solutions, an enterprise content management system (ECM) offers the most important functions for intelligent information management. The Doxis ECM platform offers a solution for automated invoice processing, covering all steps in the digital invoice workflow.

Discover Doxis - the next generation of Enterprise Content Management.