Accounts Payable organizations often face challenges in processing incoming invoices that arrive in various formats. While many customers have benefited from the automation provided by the Business Network, there is still a significant percentage of invoices that arrive manually, either through emails or traditional mail. At SAP, we recognize this challenge and have dedicated considerable attention to developing SAP Central Invoice Management to address these invoice incoming channels. Here are the key features:
- Integrating SAP Central Invoice Management with the SAP Business Network: This integration empowers customers to leverage the full potential of the SAP Business Network, enabling them to send invoices directly to their buyers through the network. Suppliers can also integrate their backend systems with SAP Business Network to efficiently track generated invoices against received orders. This is a roadmap item so stay tuned for upcoming developments on this roadmap.
- File extraction from email: Many companies receive supplier invoices in different formats (e.g., PDF, JPEG, PNG, and TIFF) as file attachments to emails. Currently, Accounts Payable clerks or Shared Services Center employees must manually process these emails, save the invoice files into specific folders, and then manually upload them to SAP Central Invoice Management to create Supplier Invoices. This process is time-consuming and requires significant effort. To streamline this process, we have introduced an IRPA Bot that automatically uploads supplier invoice files to SAP Central Invoice Management. The bot scans incoming emails to extract supplier invoice files based on accepted formats and automatically uploads them to SAP Central Invoice Management system for further processing.
- Structured Data Inbound: We will introduce an API aimed at simplifying the invoice creation process by enabling the direct transmission of structured supplier invoice data. This eliminates the requirement for processing readable documents using techniques an OCR. Furthermore, this feature offers the option of receiving the original electronic invoice as an attachment, according to your preference. This is a roadmap item so stay tuned for upcoming developments on this roadmap.
- Manual upload: For invoices that were not transferred through the automated channels mentioned above, the "upload invoices" application allows end-users to manually upload invoices. The system then transforms these invoices into structured formats, making it possible to store them in SAP Central Invoice Management.
At SAP, we continuously strive to improve and simplify the invoice management process to enhance efficiency and accuracy for our customers.
Additionally, I would like to invite you to explore our previous blogs that showcase the exciting innovations introduced in Central Invoice Management. To access these informative resources, please follow these links: Astrid Luckart Blog, and Roxana Craciun Blog.
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For more information on SAP Central Invoice Management, check out the following links:
- SAP Procurement Release Readiness Community for release information
- Help Portal Product Page for SAP Central Invoice Management
- SAP Managed Tags:
