Rapperswil-Jona city administration transforms accounts payable with DeepO automation.

Challenge

Struggling with labour-intensive, error-prone manual input of invoices to accounts payable.

The Rapperswil-Jona city administration faced significant challenges in managing its extensive accounts payable workflow: around 28’000 accounts payable documents have to be processed every year. As manual input is both labour-intensive and prone to errors, the need to digitalise and automate these processes was clear. Rapperswil-Jona decided to embrace automation and transform accounts payable.

In 2023, they kicked off this process to enhance administrative workflows. A critical component of this transformation was the integration of DeepO, a powerful tool from DeepCloud that leverages cognitive data capture technology to automate the processing of invoices. According to Cornel Widmer, Head of Financial Administration in Rapperswil-Jona, this integration was envisioned to streamline the processing of around 28’000 documents, significantly reducing manual effort and improving accuracy.

Solution

Keywords help Rapperswil-Jona keep track of 1’000 possible invoice authorisers.

Adopting DeepO has been a learning process for Rapperswil-Jona. They continually refine their DeepO integration to help the AI recognise the large variety of accounts payable documents, including handwritten notes.

But the benefits were clear from the beginning. According to Widmer, it’s the specially created keywords that show this most clearly. Keywords allow them to store the account assignment, booking text and the employee number for the first authorisation on the invoices. This helps them keep track of over 1’000 different people empowered to authorise invoices and over 6’000 account assignment combinations, drastically reducing the possibility of error.

“This new process not only saves time but also simplifies complex processes and ensures fast, transparent document processing.”

Cornel Widmer
Head of financial administration – City of Rapperswil-Jona

Results

Massively improving the quality of accounts payable accounting.

DeepO implementation is a continual process of optimisation, which makes it difficult to estimate the exact time savings at any given moment. Widmer expects significant time savings for standard invoices that arrive in DeepO via eBill or the creditor email address and are processed automatically. But as Widmer says, “time savings are not the only advantage of the new process”. Among other advantages, he cites how DeepO simplifies complex processes and provides fast and transparent document processing.

Widmer advises other organisations considering accounts payable automation to conduct a pre-project analysis of their entire payment process, from order to payment. While you do that, consider the keywords DeepO will use to recognise and process your invoices. Ensure your data structure is compatible with DeepO for optimal recognition and processing. Automation must be seen as an ongoing process, where constant adjustments and corrections must be made.

Along the way, automating accounts payable processes with DeepO has helped Rapperswil-Jona massively improve the quality of their accounting.