DigiSinergy: Less than one percent of Romanian companies use automatic invoice processing solutions

Less than one percent of Romanian companies with a turnover of more than one million euros currently use automatic invoice processing solutions, according to an analysis by DigiSinergy, a tech company that develops the InvOn solution, an automatic invoice processing application.

The very low level of digital skills, resistance to change and bureaucracy are the main blockers in adopting digital solutions in automating invoice processing in local companies, Romania being among the EU countries with the lowest performance on integrating digital technologies in the national economy, occupying the penultimate place, according The Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI) developed by the European Commission in 2020.

However, the acceleration of the digitization process in the last two years has radically changed things in Romania as well.

“With the forced digitalization in the pandemic, the concern of companies for the integration of digital technologies has grown exponentially and will continue to grow against the background of the contextual wave. Basically, in order to survive in business, companies must be one step ahead of the competition, and in accounting, where human resources are extremely important, but also limiting, specialized companies or internal departments of companies can not scale in the absence of automation.

After the experience of the last almost 2 years, we expect the adoption of automatic document processing solutions to increase, due to the awareness of the need for digitization, market growth, but also to make up for the lack of labor in this segment,” says Natalia Lepadatu, co-founder of DigiSinergy.

Roles such as data entry operators, which involve repetitive activities, but for which the profile sought requires higher education for employees, are finding it increasingly difficult to find candidates. “Thus, the main trigger to arouse the concern of companies for automatic document processing solutions comes with the need to hire colleagues for manual document processing. Once implemented, the automatic document processing solutions will generate for companies annual savings of up to 80 percent associated with this process, meaning tens and hundreds of thousands of euros per company, depending on the volume of documents processed.

This is also the case with InvOn, a solution developed by a team with over 20 years of experience in process automation, which processes 50,000 invoices per month and for which, DigiSinergy representatives estimate a 50 percent increase in monthly volume by the end of this year and with 300 percent by the end of 2022, thus reaching 150,000 financial documents processed monthly.

InvOn is a solution based on state-of-the-art technology, such as Robotic Process Automation, which uses artificial intelligence for automatic invoice processing, through optical character recognition. InvOn processes the purchase and sale invoices received on paper, as pdfs, sent through the portal or email, regardless of the number of pages, the number of lines in an invoice or their form and integrates automatically with ERP, DMS, ECM etc. The InvOn application can read information from both native PDF documents and scanned PDF documents with lower scan quality, or even image files.

At the same time, InvOn reduces invoice processing time by up to 90 percent, has a processing speed of up to 70 invoices per minute and eliminates between 95 and 99 percent of operating errors.

The investment in the integration of an automatic invoice processing solution is between 1,000 euros – 2,000 euros in the first year, and is amortized in a maximum of 2 months.

Most companies that currently automate invoice processing are from industries with large volumes of invoices, such as retail, ecommerce, audit / accounting / financial, automotive.