Optimisation and digitisation specialist FCTEC has come to market with a business process outsourcing (BPO) solution for South African small and medium businesses (SMBs) that can help them to achieve a tenfold increase in efficiency in their accounts payments (AP) function. The Cape Town- and Johannesburg-based company is already processing some 100 000 documents per month for clients in New Zealand via its BPO bureau.

With some 550 billion invoices produced a year, many of them are still processed manually, AP remains a major pain point for SMBs around the world. Whereas many large enterprises have invested in robotic process automation (RPA) and intelligent document processing to streamline extraction of data from paper and e-mailed documents, the tech has been too expensive and complex for many smaller companies up to now.

“SMBs are flooded with physical and electronic documents pouring in and out of their accounting departments,” says Johann Vosloo, head of product development at FCTEC. “The time and cost involved in manually processing these documents is significant, using up resources that most businesses would prefer to focus on growing their businesses.”

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“Intelligent document processing solutions can help companies to achieve up to a 400% increase in productivity, labour savings of 30-50%, and 90% reductions in processing times. However, SMBs don’t necessarily have the budget or skills to implement these solutions in-house. We’re aiming to plug that gap with an efficient and affordable BPO solution.”

Feeding automated processes with structured data

FCTEC, the only tier-one business partner for Ephesoft in South Africa, is offering SMBs a solution for rapidly extracting data from paper, electronic documents, PDFs, scanned images, Excel spreadsheets and a multitude of business systems. Ephesoft’s AI-powered software turns the unstructured data into structured data that can be pushed into existing business systems for a fast and seamless workflow.

Using machine learning technology, the Ephesoft platform learns to capture, classify, extract, validate and export important invoice data. It can flag any exceptions that may require human review. This standardises the AP process, provides control for AP management and eliminates data entry errors.

A business can reduce costly human error, minimise loss of documents and improve supplier satisfaction using intelligent data processing. Furthermore, AP personnel are freed from manual data entry and the need to sort, index and file purchase orders and receiving, invoice or statement documents.

Eliminating manual, error-prone effort

Says Vosloo: “SMBs can centralise invoice data entry and eliminate manual, error-prone effort by working with our BPO team. This enables them to achieve a lower cost per invoice and improve on-time payments. They can also free up their employees’ precious time and redivert it to higher-value work.

“The speed, transparency and accuracy of automated invoice processing also makes compliance easier to maintain. Digitisation of the AP function can be a great starting point for an SMB’s digital transformation and intelligent automation journey. If an AP department is processing invoices manually or using a technology that doesn’t deliver hyper automation, it has the opportunity to save time and money.”