The Financial & Accounting documents are amongst the most important for a company, as they contain the primary information, the basis of the financial statements reflecting a company’s true picture. These documents must be treated with great attention and responsibility, to be able to provide correct and complete information, both to shareholders and stakeholders (creditors, investors, banks, state authorities, press etc.).

The Financial & Accounting Departments’ responsibility is complex, as it consists in receiving and analysing each document, then registering it in accordance with the accounting and tax regulations in force, depending on the specifics of the activity and respecting specific company policies.

Let’s see how Apollo helped one of our customers in the Financial & Accounting field.

The Pain Points

1. Data entry

Financial & Accounting documents are of various types. They can be:

• purchase invoices for goods or services
• fixed assets invoices
• import/export customs declaration
• tax receipt
• regular receipts
• expenses report
• purchase order (PO)
• order confirmation
• delivery note
• purchase slip
• receipt note
• consumption receipt/delivery/transfer
• bank statements
• contracts and additional acts

and many others.

They all arrive in various formats: scanned by e-mail, by post, delivered in person or received through any other electronic sources. Receiving, analyzing, classifying, and processing of all these documents requires full-time roles in a company, making data entry one of the main pain points for a financial & accounting company.

2. Time

A document’s full and correct journey in a company is highly dependent on the employees’ knowledge of the business and role maturity. It takes up to 6 to 12 months for a new employee to be be fully independent in their role, while receiving unconditional support both in the day-to-day activity and with subsequent checks and corrections.

Analyzing documents before final registration involves a series of filters and validation steps to decide if the document can be used as a legal proof of a transaction.

Accounting is largely governed by tax regulations and this makes the accountants even more careful when receiving, for example, a simple invoice. Is the data correct? Both supplier's and customer's? Does the supplier have a valid VAT code or is it canceled somehow? Is the VAT amount correct? Ignoring such validations may lead to wrong registrations, improper tax deductions and finally, penalties for the company.

Registering an invoice in your ERP can take quite a long time depending on the type of purchase. In the case of companies that work with stocks (goods, raw materials, consumables), the introduction of an invoice requires that the items already exist in the ERP, otherwise they must be created first and only after that you can continue registering the invoice.

Let’s face it: repetitive tasks like the one above are time consuming and demotivating.

3. Errors

Manual processing, including registration after validation of the mandatory information contained in the financial-accounting documents, can generate countless errors especially when you must handle many documents, from multiple sources.

Above that, time pressure and very tight reporting periods bring the tendency to validate the documents by survey or not at all. As you might guess that may or will have serious consequences both on internal reporting but also in relation to the tax authorities, which can be much more rigorous in sanctions than the management itself.

Needless to say what happens when someone in the Financial & Accounting Department calls in sick or decides to quit the company. Who’s going to fil the gap from day one?

The Smart Approach

When using Apollo and its AI technology, our customers' documents are split, classified into individual entities, and placed in their correct category, as set by the customer, in accordance with company’s internal rules.

Apollo is not just an OCR, reading the documents. It understands the data within the documents. For example, tt can query the ERP database and automagically create new partners, new items and any other information necessary, working alongside accountants until the data is properly registered in the ERP. That’s when Apollo’s work is done.

We all know that sorting and archiving documents in accounting takes longer than registering them. Well, Apollo digitally archives the documents while registering them! During search, you will be able to identify the relevant documents, by using multiple criteria, including data contained inside the document, in a matter of seconds.

How much information can Apollo process? Countless.

How many flows can Apollo automate based on company’s current manual workflows? Countless, again.

The Benefits

The manual processing of financial & accounting documents, a repetitive and demotivating task, is transformed by Apollo into

• precious time that employees can now assign to activities requesting their unmatched human skills, bringing higher value, and making them feel that they really MATTER.
• less than 1-minute documents processing time.
• up to 99% accuracy.
• higher volume of documents to be processed at the same time.

All these while you are in full control of the process, all the time. In the SmartFlow architecture we can place as many human validation steps as the customer wants. They are called “Human in the Loop”.