What is Straight Through Processing & How Can it Benefit Your Organization?

 Introduction

Innovation is the key to bringing efficiency to and boosting productivity in an organization. Routine and mundane tasks are slowly being taken over by automation across different industries. Automation has the ability not only to speed up the processes but also can increase accuracy which in turn reduces human errors. Straight Through Processing is one such addition to documenting automation processes that can help in boosting operational efficiency in an organization.

When it comes to processing invoices, receipts, purchase orders and so on, an organization has to deal with tons of paperwork. Apart from that, human intervention is a must at all stages. This can create certain delays in processing critical documents and leading to backlogs and delays in the production & distribution of goods and services. It is estimated that employees spent up to 40% of their time only searching documents manually. Combining the strengths of advanced OCR technology and Straight Through Processing, such delays can be reduced drastically.

Understanding Straight Through Processing

Straight Through Processing (STP) is a process that makes document processing completely automated and requires almost zero human intervention. From the very beginning till the end, any type of documents, be it invoices, receipts, purchase orders, identification documents, all of them are processed without any manual inputs.

STP is a part of Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) and using self-learning Artificial Intelligence technology, the entire process can be upgraded automatically. Unstructured and unorganized documents can also be processed through STP

Stages of Automated Document Processing

Pre-Processing & Auto Rejection 

The first stage filters out the documents that cannot be processed due to their sub-standard image quality. Documents from different devices are collated here. These documents can be electronic such as e-mails or PDFs or can be handwritten or scanned images of printed files. Documents that the system identifies as sub-par quality are rejected automatically. Documents can be rejected due to their faded print, zoomed out images, an overlap of text among various other reasons. The documents that are detected and can be processed are sent through for the document classification stage.

Document Classification 

At times, documents may contain multiple pages in one document that are not related to one another. For example, purchase order and an invoice might have been scanned or merged while sending it via email. The technology can identify whether this document is an invoice, a receipt, a purchase order and separate them accordingly. Unstructured data can also be processed through the KlearStack AI technology.

Data Extraction

The data from the document is extracted at this stage. Fields like document number, description details, amount, quantity, date etc. are extracted. This stage is the most crucial of the entire process as STP is highly dependent on the accuracy of data that is being extracted.

Post-Processing

Once the data is extracted, the data is formatted and standardized. Some documents may have dates written in 01-JAN-2022 and some documents may have dates formatted in 01-01-22. In the post-processing stage, data from all fields are formatted so that when the data is processed further, it is structured uniformly.

5.    Data Validation

This is the last stage before STP. Organizations can create custom data validations wherein the documents that match the data validation criteria are processed. Say for example the organization wants to process documents that have purchase orders between USD 100,000 and USD 1,000,000, it can be done so and only those documents that match these criteria are processed. Different sets of user-defined criteria can be set by the organization for data validation. 

6.    STP

With the help of software integrations such as Quickbooks, Straight Through Processing is accomplished. Data from documents that have met the validation criteria will now be directly be transferred to the integrated software. Data that did not match the data validation criteria will be pushed to the exception queue.

 Only at this stage, human intervention is required for the data that did not go through any of the above layers. The AI technology comes with self-learning capabilities and therefore through identifying such errors, the system learns and improves the document processing accuracy.

Advantages of STP

Now that we have understood what is STP and the process of document automation, let us explore the advantages organizations will gain from the technology:

1.    Market Flexibility 

The real world is dynamic in nature and therefore, market conditions vary from season to season. When the peak business season arrives, organizations may not be able to cope with the number of documents that have to be digitized, archived and processed. Advanced OCR and AI-based solutions with the addition of STP, will help your organization to be ready when the stack of receipts and other documents doubles or quadruples. 

2.    Operational Efficiency:

STP adds a level of automation to the AI-driven technology that helps not only in extraction, identification and classification of documents but also in ensuring they are processed end-to-end with complete automation. This increases the organizations’ ability to focus on other core aspects of businesses and reduces their time spent in processing documents manually. 

3.    Cost-Effective

The STP enabled document automation solution is cost-effective in two ways.

To start with, the automation solution reduces error rates and therefore, the amount that is to be paid or to be received is calculated with quite high accuracy since the information is extracted and stored with help of complete automation.

Another way in which the automation solution is cost-effective is that requires very minimal to almost zero human intervention. The cost incurred on human resources to manage and operate the system is eliminated as well.

4.    Speed Up Documentation

STP enables smooth processing and automation of the documents. Every dataset that is in alignment with data validation criteria set by the organization is archived and documents are therefore digitized with 100% automation. This speeds up the entire documentation process and boosts the productivity of the organization.

Conclusion 

Straight Through Processing has disrupted the documentation process uniquely and innovatively. KlearStack AI solution, which is driven by advanced OCR and IDP technology, has an additional level of automation that improves the document processes at your organization. If your organization want to get rid of the hassle of manual documentation, click here to connect with our experts.