KPMG, in partnership with South Africa’s foremost provider of enterprise information management (EIM) and process automation solutions, Intervate, hosted an event where KPMG presented the fifth annual Sourcing Advisory Pulse Survey in Cape Town on 7 August 2013.
The event aimed to provide insights into improved productivity through technology and trends within the finance, shared services and accounting sectors.
Intervate demonstrated and discussed its accounts payable solution at the event, with a focus on how organisations can improve manual finance processes through automation, thereby reducing associated time and cost.
According to the pulse survey results released by professional auditing group, KPMG, the Finance and Accounting arena is a key focus area for improvement of performance and service delivery and IT systems are a key enabler to do so.
“Our information capturing solution with automated image recognition makes it possible for large organisations to streamline financial departments and processes while reducing overheads,” explains Gia Thom, Intervate’s business development manager for Imaging and Capture Solutions.
According to Thom, Intervate’s accounts payable automation solution makes it possible for large companies to cut their invoice queries by 50% due to effective detection and addressing of anomalies and automated notifications to suppliers.
The process of data capturing of invoice information is accelerated through automated data extraction of up to 98%. Automated statement extraction and matching can further reduce manual tasks by automating reconciliations.
“Query handling gives management additional visibility and allows for better and responsive decision-making. Meanwhile, the Accounts Payable team is freed up to focus on supplier relations, exceptions and tasks requiring human intervention,” explains Thom.
Information capturing, although crucial, is often seen as laborious. The benefits associated with the automation of invoicing within large entities include avoiding late payments, SARS compliance, more streamlined business processes and a reduction in overheads.
“Image recognition may be the most logical approach in the race to improve service delivery while eliminating unnecessary cost,” concludes Thom.
