Oracle Cloud ERP offers integration and collaboration solutions to help you automate B2B transactions. This includes capabilities like electronic invoicing and the Supplier Portal. While these can automate the vast majority of supplier invoices, some fraction will always require manual intervention.
If you can get email, AI can help you automate
Purchases involving sole proprietorships, one-time suppliers, and non-purchase-order transactions can all drive manual invoicing. But that doesn’t mean you can’t use automation. Accounts Payable customers can use AI-powered Intelligent Document Recognition (IDR) to automate many steps of the process. If you can get invoices via email, you can automate invoice ingestion, accounting distributions, and exception handling.
Here are three of the ways AI can help you automate manual invoicing.
1. AI-enabled invoice scanning—Intelligent Document Recognition
IDR uses AI to extract data from emailed invoices and creates an entry in Accounts Payable. Accounts Payable then prepares invoices for review, validation, and error correction by the payables team. In cases where IDR is unable to recognize an invoice field—e.g., Payment Terms, First-Party Tax Registration Number, or End Date—IDR learns from human corrections, improving levels of automation over time.
Get more details in “Adaptive learning for entire invoice and supplier corrections.”
2. Automated accounting distribution—Transaction Account Builder
Invoices that lack a corresponding purchase order pose a special challenge since payables staff can only guess at crucial details like budget and cost-center distributions. Accounts Payable provides a configurable engine (based on Transaction Account Builder) that can automatically derive account combinations for invoice lines. This saves time for the payables team and provides the data necessary for workflow-driven review and approvals.
Get more details in “Automated distribution creation using a transaction account definition.”
3. Specialized exception handling—Payables Exception Report
In cases where invoices are flagged as exceptions, special expertise may be required to address errors. For example, correcting tax calculations may require specialized skills depending on the jurisdictions and parties involved. To make things easier for payables staff—and get the benefits of specialization—Oracle Fusion ERP allows you to assign problematic invoices to team members based on the error condition. It uses the Accounts Payable Exception Report to flag problematic invoices for:
- Violating business rules (e.g., billed quantity exceeds ordered quantity)
- Configuration errors (e.g., missing setups)
- Tax-calculation errors (i.e., the calculated obligation doesn’t match invoiced tax)
- Erroneous data (e.g., header amount doesn’t match total line amount)
- Enchant Apps has a team of Oracle Cloud experts across all modules. If you are interested in learning more or have a project where you need Oracle cloud expertise, feel free to contact us!