Google Document AI Changes the Invoice Processing Game for Accounts Payable

If there is one compelling reason why businesses invest in technology, it’s to make operations more efficient or for teams to be able to perform tasks that were not previously feasible.

This is why AODocs was created: To build a better business process and document management solution designed to work with the emerging technologies of the time. Serverless SaaS applications were pointing to way, which is why AODocs was developed to seamlessly integrate with Google Drive and Cloud technologies as our foundation. This is as true today as it was when we were founded in 2012.

Artificial Intelligence Reduces or Eliminates Manual Tasks

While integrating with Google Drive and Cloud was a good start, it still meant that users would have to enter a lot of information manually if they wanted to benefit from business processes and to structure the information in their system. 

Anyone who has worked in Accounts Payable knows that supplier invoices are not standardized. Each supplier has its own way of formatting an invoice, meaning that considerable time is used to enter that data into their systems, as well as to add any metadata tags to categorize each invoice.

Factor in that manual data entry means that there is a high probability that some data entry errors will occur which can create additional issues to resolve, and the need to intelligently automate this process becomes clear.

This is why we’ve been working with Google to implement their new Document AI technology into AODocs for Invoices.

In AODocs for Invoices, Document AI and Procurement Doc AI are being used to free users from doing all of that manual work. In addition to extracting the information on an invoice and converting it into structured data, it also automates document tagging, stores them in the right folder, and then adds the invoice into customizable workflows to get approvals or to handle exceptions. 

Processing invoices is quite simple. Those sent as PDF attachments to an email simply need to be forwarded to an email address connected to AODocs for Invoice, and processing begins instantly. If you’re still getting paper invoices in the mail, those are easy to process as well - scan them in and Google’s Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology intelligently extracts the information and converts it into structured data. From there, the processing of the invoice is identical to processing a PDF version.

Google Document AI is Fully Automated

The prime reason we decided to use Google Doc AI to power AODocs for Invoices, is that it is a fully automated technology. It doesn’t expect any manual inputs on the documents it processes. 

Unlike many other AI solutions, Google Doc AI doesn’t require users to provide or create a document model. It’s smart enough to determine the meaning of the information on an invoice and mapping the resulting data accordingly. When you factor in the many different ways information can be presented on an invoice, this provides an immediate boost to productivity and accuracy.

AODocs for Invoices take full advantage of this, meaning it is completely usable on day one, with no AI training period required.

While that functionality was the prime reason we embraced Google Doc AI, since our technology is already seamlessly integrated with Google Drive and Workspace, it made sense to follow this path. Google Doc AI is part of the complete Google Cloud Platform, so it allows for a more secure architecture and fewer “moving parts” because everything was designed to be integrated. Doc AI is capable of providing hundreds of parsers for different document types all with a single integration. 

In short, Google Document AI is extremely powerful and made for a much simpler integration, more security of data, and ultimately a better solution for our customers.

Google Document AI and Future Uses

While AODocs is initially using Doc AI for our Invoices product, we are envisioning using this technology for a wide variety of use cases. Doc AI can process many different types of documents beyond invoices. 

We’re looking at automating document processing for use cases in HR, quality control, contracts, and engineering. Think about all of the documents your company likely has stored in various locations. Imagine a solution that can locate and then make sense of these documents, and then process them to expose critical information, like a contract renewal date. 

All of this could be automated without the need for human intervention. This kind of automation not only frees your team to do more meaningful work but also eliminates the risk of human errors, which is extremely valuable to our customers.

If we look at things through a more granular lens, we also see areas in specific industries where human errors could be especially problematic. Life Sciences, Manufacturing, Financial Services, Legal Departments, all require a high degree of accuracy. In each of these vertical solutions, there is a place for AI where we can leverage Google’s technology to create better solutions for our customers.

Request a Demo of AODocs for Invoices

Ready to automate your invoice processing with AODocs? Learn more and register for a demo today.