In India, there are approximately 63.56 million businesses, and this figure is growing every year. To help them manage their accounts payable processes without any errors and automate their high quantum invoice booking process by 90 percent, Clear, India’s leading fintech SaaS company, has introduced a revolutionary AI-based data extraction technique. It allows the enterprises to reduce the time taken to enter an invoice from ten minutes to a few seconds. Companies can also detect non-compliant and fraudulent invoices coming from their suppliers.
Prior to the launch, Clear ran a survey with 2,000 enterprises across India. 60% of the survey respondents were large enterprises while 40% were mid-sized companies with a turnover of INR 500 to 5000 crore. The agenda of this survey was to identify the pain points of managing accounts payable.
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The survey revealed that accounts payable teams in enterprises spend more than 70% of their time reconciling supplier invoices with purchase order and goods receipt data. The trends highlighted are not restricted to large enterprises alone. Mid-sized enterprises dealing with multiple vendors and handling high volumes of invoices also faced similar issues.
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80% of respondents rely on people and paper-based processes, and it takes almost 8 minutes for data entry personnel to punch a purchase invoice.
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Respondents noted that due to heavy dependency on fully manual approval processes such as inter-office mail/courier dispatches, enterprises end up taking more than ten days to punch a single invoice.
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Very few organisations, less than 15 percent of the sample, reported a fully-automated AP function where the booking of purchase invoices in ERP, on average, takes less than two days. These long cycles have hampered the supplier relationships due to a lack of visibility of invoices and delays in payments.
In multiple instances, enterprises have had to pay penalties worth lakhs of rupees for claiming ITC on fraudulent and non-compliant invoices. Therefore incorrect invoice recording can have a massive impact on an enterprise’s bottom line.
With Clear Capture, businesses can run 45+ compliance checks on invoices to identify non-compliance & mismatches by comparing the invoice fields with the GST data instantly. It also minimises errors and shortens the man-hours needed for invoice data entry, reducing overheads. Post validation of invoices, the users also get an option to export the invoices hassle-free directly to their ERPs or accounting systems.
Some of the other benefits include a single unified channel for communicating with vendors on their invoice compliance status, personalised dashboard, and configurable invoice approval workflows.
Archit Gupta, Founder and CEO of Clear, said, “An important first step in the compliance journey of an enterprise is recording the invoice for goods received. Clear Capture is a powerful tool for invoice digitisation by AP teams that reduces errors and the time spent on invoice recording. Our AI-based technology can help enterprises save lakhs of man-hours spent on invoice capture each year.”
The accounts payable automation market in India is growing at 11% CAGR owing to the growth in spending of enterprises on digitisation of accounts payable processes to enhance business growth, as per MarketsandMarkets survey report on Accounts Payable automation.
