To stay ahead of the competitor, companies need to invest a lot in branding and promotion. To market 100s of brands and products to the customers, companies use various marketing channels like TV, newspaper, social media, events, etc.
Just for the TV Commercials, the company’s media services team communicates with multiple agencies, channels and third party solutions that validate the actual air time against the one estimated.
Media services team manages this process manually to validate the final estimate approved by Media Manager with invoices from media agencies, tax invoices from channels and report from third party air time monitoring tool. Air time monitoring tools are used to track the actual air time of the TV Commercial.
Generally, in a global company, media services team has to process 10,000+ invoices from 100,000 TV Commercial spots. This process requires approximately 400+ man-hours to process. This manual process is tedious, prone to errors and results in delayed payments. This makes the media invoice processing a perfect candidate for automation using robotic process automation tool.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is the process of automating business operations with the help of software robots to reduce human intervention.
After automating the media invoice processing using RPA tool like AutomationEdge, the first step is to convert paper invoices into a digital format like excel or pdf using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology. Using OCR technology, AutomationEdge will read the data from the scanned copy of the paper based invoice and convert it into digital format.
[Also Read: Fastest Excel Processing RPA Tool]
The bot will then compare 10,000+ invoices from media agencies and actual air time report with business rules like Spot Time, Spot Rate per 10 seconds, Spot Cost, Time Leniency, total Free Commercial Time (FCT) & Net Amount.
The bot will create a report from this comparison in the excel format and if there is any discrepancy, bot will share it with a respective team member for review in a different sheet. If a team member accepts the discrepancy, bot will move accepted records in the excel report.
Now, the bot will compare this excel report with media estimates from agencies and creates a report with 2 sheets, called match and mismatch. These 2 sheets will be sent to the media manager for review. Media manager will either accept or reject the mismatch record. The accepted records will be moved to match sheet and rejected records will be kept in the mismatch sheet. This mismatch sheet will then be handled by the team manually. Match sheet is shared further for the payment approval.
With the inclusion of RPA, companies can eliminate errors in the process of reconciliation and validation and the automated process will reduce the processing time of 10,000+ invoice documents upto 99%.
[Also Read: 10 Best Use Cases to Automate using RPA in 2019]
Benefits of Automating Media Invoice Processing
- Automated Matching Rules- Automated invoice processing uses 2 or 3 way matching rules to ensure the billed media products align with orders and receipts.
- Approval anytime from anywhere – With invoice automation, users can approve directly from their mobile devices. They can approve from their email without login required. Automated invoicing notification reduces manual follow ups.
- Adjustable tolerances – Automated invoicing processing set the invoicing feature, which controls what process requires an automatic match and what requires manual review with tolerance settings. This automatic invoicing feature can be set globally or at the commodity level by the business team
- Exception routing and review – Based on tolerance and routing rules, in invoice processing automation, non-matching invoices are flagged and routed for review and resolution.
- Early payment discounts – Early payment discounts opportunities can be notified to prioritize and process the payments with invoice processing automation.
- Quick payment and billing without reminders – With invoice automation, matching invoices get paid and billed to the respective expense accounts without reminders
- Central invoice processing – Eliminate the cost, risk and delay of shipping goods with central processing facilities
Automation of Media Invoice Processing in any industry can benefit in on-time payment of agencies and channels, accuracy to eliminate invoice discrepancy. Thus this automating process accelerates the invoice processing, and gain financial control and visibility.
AutomationEdge is the fastest RPA platform to process data. Want to learn more about automating invoice processing, request a demo.