According to the 2017 Billentis Market Report, global invoice volume reached over 500 billion, with 8.4% of electronic exchange. In the U.S. alone, 6.8 billion invoices are generated annually and are expected to increase by 5% annually. In addition, the lack of standards and increase in vendors complicates the invoice processing workflow. While the popularity of electronic invoices and invoice automation is increasing, it is only the first step in modernizing complicated financial processes.<\/p>\n
In response to the growth of electronic invoices and the corresponding growth of email, more and more companies have created their own self-service web portals to share information with their customers and suppliers, including invoices, orders, receipts and more. In one survey<\/a>, In addition, 39 percent of respondents already had a supplier portal and 49 percent planned to implement one in the next few years.<\/p>\n Supplier portals create advantages for buyers to process and pay invoices, but a massive network of portals for suppliers to manage also creates inevitable drawbacks. Regardless of whether or not you operate a stand-alone portal<\/a> for your suppliers, your company most likely navigates a separate network of web portals to manually send invoices and other data in order to capture your business revenue every month.<\/p>\n One finance director recently informed us that they manually send more than 10,000 invoices<\/strong> to more than 40 portals<\/strong> and who declared a loss of more than $2 million<\/strong> in \u201cincorrect invoices\u201d simply because the invoices could not be sent in the correct format. If those figures sound painfully familiar, read on.<\/p>\n Robotic process automation is a flexible and cost-effective solution for portal querying and data extraction. The integration is not only fast and cost-effective, but can also be implemented by non-technical users to configure a robot to execute the exact process a human would perform when logging into a portal, uploading or retrieving information and passing it on to a downstream process.<\/p>\n Let's take a look at what access to a supplier's portal might look like.<\/p>\n Having RPA for portal access has three main advantages:<\/p>\n Improved operational performance:<\/strong>\u00a0Robots work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, make no mistakes and follow the exact process at all times. In fact, even the hardest-working professional humans try to follow processes, but the average human makes a error<\/a> in 10 out of 100 steps). The robots provide consistent and accurate 100% data.<\/p>\n Happier employees: <\/strong>Speaking of those same human workers, logging into dozens or even hundreds of portals to retrieve or upload information such as invoices is a monotonous and repetitive task. Despite the belief that robots will replace human labor, the truth is, as we have seen in RPA initiatives with proven results, they allow workers to move from operational tasks to more strategic tasks.<\/p>\n Improved business results:<\/strong> Cost savings, real-time access to data, and improved cash flow through faster processing of receivables and payables are just a few of the strategic advantages of automating supplier web portals. And once your robotic process automation solution is implemented for this use case, the benefits will drive additional investments.<\/p>\n One company, Duke Energy, discovered deficiencies in their existing accounting systems that resulted in manual business processes. On their path to automation, they sought an RPA solution that would easily integrate with their existing systems of record. Likewise, it was important to get the RPA solution in place quickly as part of the proof of concept (and show a faster ROI).<\/p>\nAutomate web portal access with RPA<\/h2>\n
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Why do you need to automate your web portals?<\/h2>\n