For many years, invoice processing was considered a stable and standardised business process. Incoming invoices were captured, reviewed and posted according to clearly defined, largely rule-based workflows. Today, however, expectations around efficiency, quality and compliance are increasing. At the same time, advances in artificial intelligence are creating new opportunities for automation. As a result, invoice processing as a whole is becoming increasingly complex.
Invoice Intake as an Enabler
One of the key drivers of this complexity is the variety of incoming channels and invoice formats. Companies receive invoices as paper documents, PDFs via email or structured e-invoices. While e-invoicing is increasingly becoming a legal requirement in many countries, PDF invoices remain widely used in Switzerland. Paper invoices also continue to play a role, particularly among smaller businesses.
The challenge is to convert these different invoice formats into a consistent, standardised data structure as early as possible in the process. This is where solutions such as the Arcplace Invoice HUB come into play. Paper, PDF and electronic invoices are received centrally, digitised where necessary, validated and enriched with relevant metadata. This creates a reliable foundation for further processing in downstream workflow systems or ERP solutions.
Invoice intake therefore becomes a key enabler of process automation. The earlier information is accurately captured, validated and normalised, the less manual clarification is required later in the process.
Intelligence in the Invoice Workflow
Requirements are also increasing throughout the subsequent stages of invoice processing. Content validation must reliably identify attempted fraud involving AI-generated documents, duplicate invoices and discrepancies relating to services, amounts or account assignments, including cases where deterministic rule-based systems reach their limits. At the same time, there is significant potential for automating cost allocation and invoice coding, not only based on purchase orders or contracts, but also through data- and AI-driven analysis of historical postings, supplier information and recurring patterns.
Arcplace Invoice Automation enables these process steps to be automated in a more targeted way. Based on data quality, purchase order or contract references, historical postings and defined business rules, invoices can be automatically pre-coded, validated and routed to the appropriate approval workflow. This allows standard cases to be processed automatically, while employees can focus on exceptions, discrepancies and decisions that require professional judgement.
Conclusion
The complexity therefore does not arise at a single point in the process, but from the interaction between intake channels, data quality, validation, invoice coding and approval. The key question for companies is how to connect these process steps in a way that makes structured data available at an early stage, enables standard cases to flow through automatically and allows exceptions to be handled in a targeted manner.
We will explore this question further in upcoming episodes of our Coffee Talk series on invoice processing.
Johannes Egli, Principal Consultant
