One of the greatest challenges for Accounts Payable (AP) departments is how to handle the mountain of paper invoices they are faced with every day. Manually processing large volumes of documents can make invoice processing expensive, time-consuming and prone to error.

There are a number of solutions available that attempt to streamline AP process.

However, each of these has its limitations:

• Electronic invoicing (EDI) requires your suppliers to alter their systems in order to provide invoices in the required format and only a few will adopt EDI.
• Managing spend on purchase cards can be difficult and they are not appropriate in all environments.
• Employing more staff to handle ever increasing volume is expensive and simply doesn’t solve the problem.

These options do not adequately address all of the issues faced by AP departments today. Instead, companies often find that these solutions bring them a new set of challenges which in turn can mean that the predicted return on investment is not achieved.

Automated Invoice Processing from ORS saves you time and money

We provide a comprehensive set of solutions to the problem. These solutions enable organisations to reduce the number of complex, time-consuming and costly manual processes within your AP department.

Through the implementation of an ORS automated invoice processing service, we can eliminate time consuming paper processing, help validate invoices and allow your AP department to focus on resolving problem invoices rather than constantly having to chase authorisation of invoice payment.

By helping remove the non-core process of manually entering invoice data, and by streamlining the matching and validation process, ORS allow your Finance Department to move straight from receipt through to invoice payment with little or no manual intervention required. In addition, no changes are required to your supplier’s invoice formats, whether paper or electronic. As a result the overall cost of processing your invoices is reduced by 90%.

How the service works

All of your incoming invoices are re-directed to the ORS mail processing centre via a dedicated PO Box number unique to your company. This ORS service can also accept electronic invoices, pdf attachments from emails or invoices received by fax.

Once scanned and in the system, invoices are read using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software and key data fields are extracted. These can be used to determine if the invoice needs to be routed for coding and onward approval or if it can be posted to the ledger.

Your users can then be informed of any invoice requiring their attention by automatic email alerts, so can take action immediately, improving efficiency and decrease processing times.

Images and associated data are then passed back to your ERP / Finance System to be posted to the ledger. Images of invoices can be captured and stored against PO information if required and can then be recalled from within the ERP or the ORS hosted solution via the Web for greater access and availability.

Related business documents – such as GRN’s, POD’s and original PO information – can also be stored as related documents to provide all relevant information from a single place. This can greatly help your AP staff when faced with a supplier query to be able to access all relevant business documentation from a single consolidated point.

ORS invoice processing solutions help automate and streamline traditionally paper-based and time consuming manual processes.

The benefits of Automated Invoice Processing

Reduce Costs

By using ORS as your Invoice Processing Partner, we will help cut errors in your AP process by decreasing the amount of duplicate or incorrect payments made. Companies can often accidentally pay the same invoice more than once, and the time involved in rectifying this can impact on AP staff by taking away from core tasks.

For supplier enquiries to invoice status it is estimated that the cost of retrieving a filed invoice can be as much as £10 per item. Working with electronic invoice data can completely eliminate this cost as AP staff can retrieve invoice information from their desktops.

Processing invoices more efficiently also enables businesses to negotiate early settlement discounts with suppliers.

End the paper chase

All of our customers benefit from eliminating the need to handle paper invoices. Once converted to electronic data and images, invoices become easier to process, retrieve and store.

Businesses can also save space in the office as paper copies no longer need to be archived.

Ensure regulatory compliance

The ORS automated invoice processing services track all invoices, giving your AP manager unprecedented visibility and control over their payables process. A full audit trail for all invoices helps your organisation to comply with external legislations, such as Sarbanes-Oxley and the EU 8^th Company Law Directive.

Additional benefits

• Increase in the efficiency of your AP department by up to 90%
• Increase in your workflow efficiency
• Reduction in data entry costs
• Increased invoice processing times
• Productivity per employee dramatically increased
• Receipt of all invoice data electronically
• Reduction in human intervention substantially reducing error rates
• Motivated staff adding value to your company

Why choose ORS as your Automated Invoice Processing Partner?

ORS have more than 20 years of expertise in the automated payments, Accounts Payable and document and data processing market. This makes us the natural partner of choice in improving your AP processes.

ORS provide collaborative payment, invoice and document automation solutions to organisations across the UK. Our solutions are used to streamline, automate and manage processes and transactions involving global payments, invoice approval, purchase-to-pay, collections, mail processing and document or data process automation.

Our customers trust these solutions to meet their needs for cost reduction, competitive differentiation and optimisation of working capital.

ORS – Your UK based Outsourced Mail Processing partner 

Over the past decade, some massive investments have been made in various IT solutions, for the purpose of making business documents and data handling more efficient. However, in most organisations, the mail room is still the bottleneck that prevents complete success.

Your Mailroom staff must analyse each incoming document or piece of data to try and determine the correct destination, person or department, to effect physical distribution as efficiently as possible.

At the interim destination, other staff may need to examine the document, as well, in order to determine the correct recipient and or actions required. This is then followed by another round of distribution.

At the final destination, often a highly skilled person has to spend time entering the document or data into the relevant back office solution, for example a workflow, CRM or Finance system. This process diverts valuable competence from the core functions of your business.

ORS Correspondence and mail processing services

With an ORS mail processing solution, you have one UK ‘outsourced’ entrance for all of your incoming business documents. Whether paper, faxes or email, they all pass through the same system, to be scanned (if paper), classified, sorted and distributed to the appropriate destinations.

The result is fast, accurate delivery of all your business critical information, whilst allowing your staff to focus on the day to day core functions of your business.

Efficiency increases when each document is distributed correctly and prioritised according to business rules. Your business processes gain significant improvements when fed with key data and digital images.

Fast access to online status and audit trail information gives you better control over your information flow. And smooth integration with target systems such as ERP, CRM, databases, archiving and email servers really powers your business processes both internally and externally.

ORS mail processing services mimic the actions of your current post-room, reading, sorting, categorising and distributing mail and data items around your business as electronic files to target systems within your organisation.

How the service works

As an ORS customer, your business will be provided with a dedicated PO Box, secure FTP site and encrypted email address managed by ORS.

All of your incoming mail is then redirected by you to this PO Box and all data to the FTP site or email address.

All of your incoming mail items are then put through the following process steps before the images and data are returned to you in line with your business requirements;

• Your post items, emails or electronic data are received via the ORS Mail Processing Services (PO Box, FTP or email)
• These items are security screened via x ray and sniffer devices (excluding electronic data)
• Post items logged onto internal Job Control system – listing number of mail items received
• All exceptions such as Parcels, Magazines etc are recorded before arranging return to your organisation
• Items then opened and document types sorted into your defined applications
• All envelopes are reviewed to ensure that they are empty and then retained
• Mail items then prepared for scanning stage
• Relevant Batch Headers, Bar-coded Headers or separator sheets are introduced to each batch
• Items are batched and passed to scanning for image conversion
• Items are then scanned and all headers removed
• Your scanned images or electronic data are then passed through our mail processing workflow solution
• Your images are classified to department and document level before being processed through our intelligent sorting and data capture software looking at structured and unstructured data extraction
• Images are then either sent for manual data entry, or data is captured through the use of OCR, ICR, Invoice or Forms recognition templates.
• Captured Images and associated index data is then passed through the QC stage
• Images and data are then prepared for return to you via 
• �
  • TRNG encrypted media
  • Secure FTP transfer
  • Point to point transfer via ‘Connect-direct’
  • Loaded into your current systems such as EDM, ERP, CRM, Housing and Finance.

Who benefits of an Outsourced Mail processing solution?

Any business can benefit from increased efficiency in outsourcing the handling and processing of all correspondence, including;

•  Social Housing
• Public Sector
• Healthcare
• Utilities
• Business Services
• Insurance
• Retail
• Telecommunications
• Travel
• Energy Organisations
• Emergency Services
• MOD

Obvious Business Benefits

ORS will automate your post and mail room processes with data capture, classification, sorting, and distribution with a full understanding of your documents which will improve not only your front end business efficiencies but all subsequent processes along with the following; 

• Lower operational mail processing costs by up to 75%
• Increased efficiency in all business area’s by instant and correct distribution of each document
• Substantial increase in workflow efficiency
• Reduce your data entry costs
• Reduce your data entry errors
• Speed up your processing times
• Improvements in your staff productivity
• Significant increase in customer service levels
• Remove the risk of document duplication or loss
• Reduce office space
• Support for early archiving of all incoming documents
• Be provided with an offsite disaster recovery provision

The ORS mail processing services provide you with the assurance that the returned data is accurate and can be used to drive required business processes.

Many current ORS customers use this provided data to drive their back office systems, allowing their business processes to be driven without the need for any manual intervention.