CHALLENGE

The traditional Accounts Payable process involves huge manual effort of inputting and verifying the vendor invoice data into their Accounts Payable system, which is time consuming, error-prone and difficult to manage.

Therefore HKUST sought alternative solution to achieve higher operational efficiency, better user experience (UX), higher data visibility, and support the initiative of single source of truth.

SOLUTION

To streamline the vendor payment process, WCL helped HKUST to build “invoice-intelligent-capture-system” as parts of their end-to-end AP process automation, which includes the following:

(1) Instead of sending hard copy invoices to the Finance Office, vendors were invited to send softcopy invoices directly to a designated email account of their Finance Office.

(2) We used the optical character recognition (OCR) technique to auto-capture invoice information from invoice image in the dedicated hot folder.

(3) Our OCR solution also verified the compliance of invoice by:

• Invoice number duplicate checking

• Check data against approved PO and GRNs

So their FMS system can automatically create payment vouchers for compliance invoice, and automated the subsequent approval and accounting entries generation process.

For those invoice which corresponding PO/GRNs cannot be identified, notification email would be sent to corresponding Department user.

(4) We have also helped HKUST to build a Enterprise Content Management (ECM) as a central repository of invoice and integrated with their FMS. The indexed invoice image would be automatically captured in ECM system and interfaced with vouchers created. Department users can search the vouchers online via the Financial Management System and can see the invoice image in ECM.

BENEFITS

• Operation efficiency of AP processing is highly improved as OCR speeds up the data entry and verification.

• Better user experience (Department user and vendors) due to AP automation.

• Data accuracy can be ensured with reference to related POs & GRNs (by OCR)

• Certain system controls in place, eg duplicate check for invoice number, 3-way matching (PO-good receipt-invoice), etc

• The initiative of single source of truth can be supported by ECM.