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Nipendo – A Guide to Invoice Automation

The cost incurred by large manufacturers around invoice processing is exorbitant – both in terms of the traceable cost-per-item and in terms of the associated errors, wasted time, negative impact on supplier relationships, and the like.

The Nipendo SaaS platform delivers hyperautomation capabilities, which slash invoice-processing costs by more than half and significantly streamline the process. It supports the management, implementation, and operation of digital invoice receipt and of paperless digital transaction invoices from all supplier types and sizes, regardless of the underlying ERP or accounting system, in line with local e-invoicing
regulations in more than 50 countries around the world, covering all spend processes:

• Digital tax invoices for goods orders
• Digital tax invoices for service orders
• Non-PO invoices and financial transaction invoices
• Credits – Full or partial credit for digital tax invoices and financial credits

The platform supports the rapid and cost-effective implementation and operation of complex B2B invoice interfaces, but also offers other modes of interaction for submitting invoices: email, web portal, mobile app and paper, and can capture both image and data, assuring 100% accuracy.

Automatic Invoice Validations

Nipendo’s e-invoicing solution, which is based on a home-grown RPA engine, allows for the configuration of business rules and the accommodation of legal requirements to perform automatic validations on e-invoices within the platform. It comes with Best Practices templates for many types of Procure-to-Pay processes, each containing dozens of business validations, including two, three and four-way matching, date validations, currency conversion rates, tax validations, amount linkage, loads, returns and many other built-in validation capabilities.

More than 250, home-grown validation robots enable the design of automatic workflows that comply with the customer’s business policies and processes, addressing a wide range of invoice types: for goods, services, or both, proforma, credit, non-PO, financial, and more.

The platform can perform invoice validations against orders and GRs, covering all business scenarios in accordance with local e-invoicing regulations and specific customer requirements and includes many technical validations around formats, characters, structure, accuracy, and alignment of data within the same document, and more.

Nipendo also includes discrepancy correction and dispute resolution modules, which enable suppliers to correct errors as they occur, in the cloud, before they reach the customer.

Before receipt by the customer, the invoice is preemptively validated, ensuring data accuracy and compliance with the buyer’s requirements and with local regulations. With Nipendo’s Instant Invoice Reconciliation technology, suppliers get immediate notification if an invoice is non-compliant, so that errors can be corrected before the invoice ever reaches the customer’s ERP system, such that close to 100% of invoices are processed automatically all the way through to the ERP system.

E-invoicing solution process flow

The e-invoicing process includes the following steps:

• Supplier issues an invoice in its information system in compliance with local regulations and sends it to the customer through the Nipendo platform using a direct B2B connection, the web portal, mobile app or through email (where Nipendo’s combined OCR-AI functionality retrieves key data, which it uses to
forward on the invoice).
• The invoice is archived in the Nipendo portal
• The Nipendo platform performs automatic validations using RPA, identifies errors and requires their correction
• The Nipendo platform posts the invoice in the customer’s ERP system and notifies the supplier of its status

A basic list of validation types would look like this:
• Mandatory data, including that which depends on the invoice or order type
• Formats for quantity, price, and date fields
• Internal logic: sum of rows identical to total invoice, etc.
• Sending dates and dates format
• Examinations of pre-existence documents, such as an order, goods receipt, or drafts
• VAT, coins, units of measure
• Quantitative tests, comparing to that, which appears in previous documents (PO, GR, draft account, etc.)
• Unit price
• Total invoice against past documents
• Linkage to foreign currencies and other indices
• Comparison of invoice VAT to actual country VAT
• Credit invoices to tax invoices
• Tax invoice to relevant transaction accounts

Summary

Nipendo’s platform enables the upload, management and archiving or e-invoices. It includes:
• Various tools for uploading and sending digital invoices
• Simple ways by which an invoice can be flipped from PO, GR, SES or invoice draft
• Automatic invoice validations
• Invoice list and invoice status presentation
• Advanced search options
• Invoice detail and image presentation (title, lines and total)
• Adding and managing invoice attachments
• Invoice status and history
• Dispute resolution: option to correct the invoice data according to system instructions, and to resubmit it
• Excel invoice download
• Business chat between AP team and supplier
• Link to relevant documents