Invoices: end-to-end solution for incoming documents

The University Hospital Hamburg-Eppendorf is optimising its processes with comprehensive, automated processing of incoming documents with tangro solutions. Thanks to tangro, the UKE is particularly efficiently equipped with comprehensive automation in document processing in, among others, purchasing. This is particularly true in the case of invoice verification: more than 20 per cent of the 120,000 invoices which come in in total each year are now completely, autonomously processed; that is without any manual intervention from staff. "Our invoice processing has become much faster thanks to tangro," says Christiane Körner, Director of Finance and Controlling at the Klinik Logistik Eppendorf GmbH, a subsidiary of the UKE. "Around 100 invoices a day are posted in the background as soon as they are received."

For automated processing it is irrelevant how the documents are received – tangro supports all variations. Paper documents only need to be scanned in, whereas the content of the electronic invoices is collected directly. In every case, the solution automatically recognises the relevant document content and compares it with the existing data in SAP. If there are no deviations then, as previously described, it can be posted completely autonomously. Of course there are certain invoices which are excluded from automated posting, such as those which explicitly require monitoring by a member of staff. These invoices are captured via the automated process which then directly completes the tangro processing screen with the content, and then makes the document image available online. This makes the process considerably easier: the data from the order are transferred directly into SAP and the price is checked.

The subsequent approval is equally autonomous in tangro workflow. "At any given time it is clear where and at which processing stage an invoice can be found. Traceability and transparency have been significantly improved," says Christiane Körner. The invoice entry journal has also benefited from more transparency, as the complete overview of incoming documents is presented alongside the status information. With just one glance it can be seen which documents are currently being automatically posted and which, for example, are sitting in the workflow.

Thanks to these optimised processes, invoice verification at the UKE can still proceed with the same number of staff despite the continuously increasing number of documents. Yet more: those who chose to leave do not necessarily have to be replaced. "We are able to stay on top of the increasing volume of documents even with fewer staff," confirms Christiane Körner.