Why finance teams need AI data extraction
The pain points of invoice processing at scale are familiar to every enterprise accounts payable team out there. High volumes and multiple vendors, different formatting, manual downloading, data entry, re-keying, and re-entry. Even with good OCR tools, there are still delays, mistakes, quality oversights, and, inevitably, do-overs.
Manual processing typically takes somewhere between 10 and 30 minutes per invoice, with an average of 17 days from receipt to completion. For teams with best-in-class OCR and automation (but without AI), it’s an average of three days to completion.
AI can support enterprise finance teams by reducing the remaining daily frictions. AI vision, intelligent data capture, and AI data extraction, for example, can cut invoice processing to as little as 60 seconds.
iSoftStone has made end-to-end AI tools such as our Smart Invoice Agent widely available through Microsoft Marketplace, and we also create custom AI solutions to meet finance teams’ unique needs. We worked with one major retailer to custom-build an AI service endpoint that takes invoices from hundreds of vendors and converts them into structured data ready for ERP and downstream business systems.
OCR solutions are time-consuming, and they’re just not able to handle dynamic input. Intelligent document processing powered by AI vision gives companies the agility to handle highly variable invoice formats with minimal engineering overhead.
Harver Yang, Senior Software Development Manager | iSoftStone
Our client said goodbye to painful OCR training & manual capture
The retailer was facing many of the above issues, with the added challenge that many of their vendors’ invoices are complex with multiple line items that run to 50+ pages. Their finance team also has to contend with seasonal bottlenecks like the holidays.
Says Harver Yang, iSoftStone’s delivery lead on the project, “The company needed a faster turnaround and more reliable, structured data to support downstream operations. iSoftStone was already acting as their AI engineering team, embedded with the company’s technology org, and we were ready to help.”
The company’s IT team had previously used an AI-powered low code/no code platform to build a data extraction service. It made processing smoother but still required multiple rounds of OCR training and template design, which was time-consuming. Since the service couldn’t contextually read the invoices, it was never foolproof against the different invoice formats used by the company’s hundreds of vendors.
As Yang notes, “Rule-based extraction was not viable. That approach only works well if the invoices look similar, are always from the same vendor, and the vendor is always using the same format. In this case, the invoice template varied by vendors.”
The other downside? The service was consuming AI tokens without performing as hoped. A lot of AI tokens.
Delivering accurate AI data extraction at a lower cost
With our client taking the lead on developing a new end-to-end solution for invoice processing, iSoftStone was delighted to partner with them on the project. Our team designed and built the vital service endpoint that uses AI vision to automatically extract data and transform vendor invoices into structured, ERP-ready data.
The new service significantly reduces LLM token consumption while intelligently contextualizing and filtering out non-invoice data. Repeated line items are reconciled, and issues with processing multiple pages have been eliminated. No more templates to set up; no tedious OCR training required.
To give users flexibility and optimize performance, we included an adjustable image-resolution setting. For very long documents, users have the option to choose a lower resolution to reduce any lag, and they can toggle back to reprocessing at higher resolution when needed.
AI solutions for finance & beyond
With a cost-effective AI-powered invoice intelligence service that automatically delivers clean, structured data for core financial workflows and downstream systems, the company’s finance team is moving faster and with greater operational efficiency.
We believe AI services and solutions are at their best when they’re eliminating real day-to-day frustrations and automating in a cost-effective way to deliver true ROI.
Whether, like this client, you’re looking for a bespoke solution to your challenges or perhaps a managed application like Smart Invoice Agent by iSoftStone, we’re here to help you implement the AI tools you need, exactly how you need them.
