CloudTrade Expands eInvoice Processing Capabilities

Electronic invoice processing firm CloudTrade is aiming to capture data from more documents that pass through the back office by expanding its services. A press release issued Thursday (Dec. 14) said CloudTrade is launching Cloud Capture, a service that reportedly enables businesses to capture 100 percent of human-readable documents.

The eInvoicing tool uses optical character recognition (OCR) technology, obtained via CloudTrade’s partnership with Mitie Document Management, to be able to extract data from structured and semi-structured documents.

“There is no doubt that the business and environmental impact of practices such as paper invoicing and paper purchase orders have rendered them unstable and hugely unproductive,” said CloudTrade CEO David Cocks in a statement, adding that “eInvoicing and eDocuments are a modern, innovative solution to the paper problem.”

“To date, our patented technology has enabled documents, supplier invoices and customer orders to be received as text PDFs and automatically converted into an eDocument structure,” added CloudTrade Commercial Director Richard Manson in another statement. “We map the data embedded within the PDF as created by the originating system and convert this into a format accepted by the recipient.”

“As this approach is so simple and non-disruptive to any supply chain, adoption rates are extremely high when an organization promotes this method of eInvoicing,” Manson continued, though he added that it is likely that businesses will always have some form of paper processes in their back offices, despite high adoption rates of document readers and eDocuments. Using OCR technology means companies can capture data from paper documents that are scanned and turned into PDFs.

The launch of CloudTrade’s newest accounts payable solution comes the same week that research from Wax Digital highlighted the challenge companies face in processing supplier invoices, with 82 percent of professionals surveyed by the company admitting poor invoice process management is negatively impacting their companies’ abilities to perform effectively. Sixty percent said processing supplier invoices was the least-liked aspect of the job within their teams.