The first step in reducing the throughput of paper in the company lay in digitising the invoices as they arrived. To that end, Inpute an intelligent scanning solution and scanners OCS’s accounts payable department.

Once scanned, documents are processed by the OCR (optical character recognition) module. No two invoices are quite the same, but the system is ‘trained’ to identify and extract key invoice data no matter where on the document it appeared.

Staff log onto the system – which sits on OCS’ intranet – each morning. At lunchtime, emails are automatically dispatched to staff members who have invoices in the queue awaiting their approval. By clicking a link within the email message, the staff member is brought directly to the invoice where it can be approved, rejected, queried, parked and so on; a range of choices are available depending on level of authorisation.