What is E-invoice or construction invoice automation?

A common question we get asked is what is e-invoicing or invoice automation?

So, electronic invoicing is the exchange of an electronic invoice document between a supplier and a buyer. And a more popular question will be, well, why is that important to me? Or how is that going to reduce the time I spend processing invoicing? Or how will that reduce the cost for me?

Well, in LiveCosts, what we’ve done is we’ve utilised that technology and we’ve built it into a purposely built construction workflow that’s going to significantly reduce the amount of time you spend processing invoices and increase the accuracy in which you do so. How we do that is we have a purposely built inbox. And in this inbox, we can just take invoices and drop them into LiveCosts through a drop zone or email them in straight via your email or your supplier can email them in on your behalf. Either way, LiveCosts just needs to see a copy of that document.

And what we do with that document is we use smart OCR technology and machine learning to understand all the data that’s coming in on this document. And the more data the system sees belonging to you and your suppliers, the smarter it gets. What happens in terms of its workflow is we basically suck up all the information related to this invoice onto a single screen.

And this is going to tell you everything you need to know about this document. So, once the invoice lands into LiveCosts, in the background, we’re going to basically extract all the data from that document. What are we going to do with it? We’re going to link it up to the ordering information.

Who raised the order? What was the agreement of the order? And do they reconcile? Who took the delivery in, has everything arrived from the site related to this invoice? What are the line items on this invoice? How do they compare into what’s in my pricing Catalogue? And am I being overcharged on this single line item? Is it a duplicate? Can I collect the data from it? Every single little data point will also be collected here and approved against the project as they’ve been landed in. And also then from an automation point of view, populated and synced across into our accounts product. So, it’s about dropping invoices in, collecting goods received notices, purchase orders, automated job costing, everything you can think of that’s related to that invoice can be automated and attached to it to save you a lot of time and increase your accuracy of how you’re pushing these through.

We can also start to get some benefits and look at the line items from our suppliers. So, if I search for any product code, now that the invoices are coming in electronically, we’ve got data, we can start to search data. So, if I wanted to see a product code off all invoices over all projects from all suppliers, I can start to see how much I’ve spent on that product code and we’re getting that for free.

So, not just the automation piece now, we’re getting data in the background, which is going to improve the smarts in your business.

If you’d like to improve how you process invoices, please visit LiveCosts.com. Feel free to take a free trial or a product tour.