If you're new to AP automation or even if you're already automating invoice processing, you may not be familiar with payment automation. Today's full cycle payment technologies didn't even exist five or ten years ago. Now, payment automation adoption rates are increasing rapidly as businesses move away paper checks and towards digital payment methods. This is how DTI can stand up a full cycle payment process for your business.
Collection
You tell us how your invoices are coming in today, and we will work to optimize invoice collection by working with you and your vendors moving to electronic submission of invoices. Setting up a new email address for invoice submission and communicating with your vendors works very well. For those vendors that still must send paper invoices, we establish a PO Box that is checked daily and scanned into our system. Any invoice received at your corporate location, can simply be scanned and emailed to us to automatically start the process. Any invoices sent to personal emails can be forwarded to your invoice email for automatic processing. Any non invoice related emails will be sent to a review inbox for your team to decide on appropriate action.
Processing
Our system constantly monitors the designated inbox e.g. (invoices@abc.com). When new items arrive, our team reviews the email and attachment to ensure it is an invoice and initiates the workflow. the invoice and the email message are pulled into our processing queue. Our team gets to work collecting invoice data. This is done through AI and Machine learning software or manual hand keying. Using your processing rules, we will define routing and approval requirements that will determine how the rest of the process flows. DTI can also code invoices for you or invoices can be coded by your team. Our process includes work queues for exception handling and special processing requirements.
Integration to your ERP
When invoices complete the coding and approval process, they are batched and uploaded to your ERP system. We use a variety of methods to integrate this data including API integrations, file uploads, and robotic process automation software.
Visibility and Reporting
DTI provides a comprehensive reporting dashboard preconfigured with the most common report types to show user productivity, invoice progress through the process, end of month accruals, and warnings about late payments and exception cases.
Payment Review
When it's time to make payments, you simply send us a payment file with transaction details. That file is loaded into your workflow tool providing your finance team a simple interface to review pending payments before sending. Payments can be approved, paused, cancelled, or held pending other research. In the workflow tool, users will have access to other documents supporting that transaction such as a PO or correspondence.
Payment Submission
Approved payments are ready for submission. We create a revised payment file and submit it to our cloud-based payment platform. Our team works with your suppliers to optimize your payments to ultimately reduce issuance cost, reduce risk of fraud, and ensure accurate and on-time payments.
We print and send checks, submit ACH payments, and process credit card transactions when possible through virtual or ghost card payments. You will earn rebates on any payments made through virtual or ghost cards, turning you AP department into a source of revenue.
Once payment is made, we send reconciliation advice back to your ERP and workflow solution. Our customer service team monitors payment status and will contact your vendor if cards have not been processed in a timely fashion, checks have not cleared, or an ACH transaction fails for any reason.
