Smart FI Automation

Let us start with some definition, what are FI Invoices?

Everything starts with a purchase order (PO) number, used to control the purchasing of products and services from external suppliers. A document, including the PO number, indicates types, quantities, and agreed prices for products or services. FI invoices are those that are not related to any purchase order. 

These invoices have to be identified and checked for formal purposes (e.g. rules defined by German VAT law). Each year, DTSE receives approximately 105 000 of FI vendor invoices from external German vendors. The identification of all relevant parameters, e.g. tax code and GL account, that are needed to perform the final booking, is a necessary step before processing the invoice.

For each FI vendor invoice, an accountant:

• checks if it meets the legal requirements of Article 14 of the German Value Added Tax Code
• checks if the invoice represents a procurement exception
• checks if the invoice represents a special ledger transaction such as a downpayment or a deposit
• identifies the type of delivered goods or services
• derives from that information the respective GL account and tax code per each invoice line item

this sounds like a lot of manual work, does not it?

Our Solution

We check legal obligations on formal aspects of the invoice, train a learning model for the correct account and VAT. The AI solution predicts the G/L account and the tax code by taking into account additional information obtained by reading the invoice (pdf) with an OCR solution.The AI solution writes the predicted values in a VIM table and performs the posting automatically.