International Conference on Smart Data Intelligence

(ICSMDI 2021)

Invoice Processing using RPA & AI

Devanshi Desai a, Ansh Jain b, Dhaivat Naik c, Nishita Panchal d, Dattatray Sawant e*
a
Department of Computer Engineering, SVKM’s NMIMS Mukesh Patel School of Technology Management and Engineering, Mumbai – 400056, India
b
Department of Computer Engineering, SVKM’s NMIMS Mukesh Patel School of Technology Management and Engineering, Mumbai – 400056, India
c
Department of Computer Engineering, SVKM’s NMIMS Mukesh Patel School of Technology Management and Engineering, Mumbai – 400056, India
d
Department of Computer Engineering, SVKM’s NMIMS Mukesh Patel School of Technology Management and Engineering, Mumbai – 400056, India
e*
Department of Mechatronics Engineering, SVKM’s NMIMS Mukesh Patel School of Technology Management and Engineering, Mumbai – 400056,India

E-mail address: dattatray.sawant@nmims.edu

ABSTRACT

Invoice Processing with the help of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Automation Anywhere helps in processing of documents for the purpose
of future ease and enables a hassle-free experience in handling invoices due to the presence of easy storage, absence of any way of losing respective
invoice, reduction in costs of transition from paper billing to electronics and so on. A market survey highlighting the requirement of automated invoices in
daily business. With the help of Intelligent Document Processing, the usage of generated structured data helps in automating more processes. The IQ Bot
is used to classify, extract and validate the documents and further helps in processing unstructured data using AI Technologies such as Computer Vision,
Machine Learning, and Text Classification.

Keywords:
Invoice Processing; Automation Anywhere (AA); Aritificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML).

1. Introduction

Processing an invoice, any invoice for products, taxes, or merchandise, can now be done electronically because it is more reliable and efficient than the
traditional paper-based method [1]. In these days where every device: laptops, mobile phones, are all connected to a network, which the people use very
frequently as their personal life and work are all now, browsing through e-mails, being available on instant messaging applications, it all falls for
electronic invoicing as it will be easily accessible to the people.

All is possible digitally in part because of Extensible Markup Language, XML, which is a medium used by virtually all to send and receive digital-all,
including invoices [3][4]. There are several sites that use online resources to store, receive, process invoices, and then route that information to tax
collectors [4]. These invoices will now be submitted as a PDF directly from the customer's e-mail to the appropriate individuals. When it comes to
invoices, security is of the utmost importance because they provide a lot of personal information about the customer, such as bank records, transaction
address, and time.

However, security is a delicate subject, and each city or country can have various laws about electronic invoices. The rules should essentially be
dependent on the sensitivity of the information, authentication, anonymity, non-repudiation of origin and recipient, and several other factors [3]. The
benefits of using electronic invoices include: less time and resources spent, no paper waste, all payments are processed in one location, the customer has
power over the payments, and, most importantly, reliability [5]. It is also an established reality from [6] that invoices in a company play a significant role
in their B2C relationships, as it serves to improve the relationship when the client trusts them more.

When we equate conventional invoicing to new electronic invoicing, we find that the digital method has helped to reduce shipping costs while also saving
time by reducing the workflow [7]. Environmentally, the new method of treating invoices has a much smaller effect simply because no paper is used,
resulting in less trees being affected [8]. When we talk about electronic invoicing on a business level also, a lot of billing processes are reduced which not
only shoots up the productivity, but also decreases the time went into handling units and so on [9].

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3852575

2. Intelligent Document Processing

One of the main problems which rose when RPA was born was the need to process a huge number of documents and all of the documents and forms share
equal form it was very much required. Initially, processing of documents with RPA was done with the help of Optical Character Recognition, but this
technique had a lot of issues like interpreting natural language, detecting blurred text and thus it was clear that without proper intelligence or guidance, it
wasn’t accurate.

Thus, the combination of AI with RPA started to roll out as both together gave birth to Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) which uses ML to classify,
extract the data in the documents into structured data. Also, with the help of IDP, the usage of generated structured data helps to automate more processes.
Hence RPA with AI – also coined as Cognitive Automation is one of the most promising areas in RPA.

3. Automation Anywhere

IQ bot provided by AA is used to extract structured or unstructured data as it uses AI, ML, NLP to learn and extract information from the documents. The
reason why we chose automation anywhere is because it has AI-based learning algorithms to recognize and classify the content and the fact that it doesn’t
depend on OCR is a really good plus point. Also, because it’s an IQ bot, it continuously learns from user feedback and validation therefore increases
accuracy [10].

We have used ML based IQ Bot. The IQ bot contains a ML tool using Naïve Bayes Algorithm. Bayesian Naïve Bayes algorithm is based on Bayesian
decision theory and is widely used. The algorithm is built on features that it employs to identify the text in question. According to Rennie et al. [11], [12],
the algorithm does not consider the relationships between the functions, which may be seen as a simplistic model. Since certain features have no
relationship with one another, patterns with more complicated relationships may be missed by the algorithm.

According to Rish [11], [13], the best time to use Naïve Bayes is when the problem can be built as a one-to-one feature. Based on previously encountered
facts, the Naïve Bayes algorithm calculates the likelihood of something happening in various scenarios. It calculates the likelihood of each function
separately, multiplies them together with all possible outcomes, and chooses the one with the highest probability. As a result, if the likelihood of one or
more of the independent characteristics for a particular outcome is negative, the outcome's probability is therefore zero. Study conducted by Rish states
that Naïve Bayes [11], [13] works perfectly where the situation calls for independent or dependent features, and all of this is also done while not giving a
bad performance in between these north and south poles [11], [13, p.41]. This explains the fact that Naïve Bayes can be used with accurate and can be
agreed solutions.

The way to find out whether Naïve Bayes would be best suitable for invoice processing or not was with the help of spam filtering, as they both share a lot
of similar things. To determine whether an invoice is correctly processed or not, there could be a function presented in formula (1). The formula goes like:
f = I  B, where I could be the amount, date, units’ price, product and B could have the data of correct. With this formula it can be deduced that all the
entries done in set A will have a direct effect on the result of set B [11], [14].

Due to the extreme various values used, and because they could not vary for an invoice line labelled as right, the form of Naïve Bayes used was both
multinomial and Gaussian. The machine learning prototype is designed to see how Naïve Bayes reacts to data set deviations. A database was used to
preserve the most recently processed data in the prototype. The tag "right" or "incorrect" was assigned to this info. If the likelihood is greater than or equal
to 99 percent, the prototype will process the data; otherwise, the user must manually label the data.

The majority of RPA implementations make use of software bots that automate tasks based on pre-defined or predetermined guidelines. When business
operations became more sophisticated, artificial intelligence (AI) technology such as machine learning (ML) began to shape how bots could do more.
With the addition of ML, bots constantly learn from human behaviour, replicating human cognition to some degree. The more teaching and learning
delivered, the better bots will come to reading, visualising, learning, and thinking like humans. RPA is about behaviours, while machine learning (ML) is
about reasoning and mimicking human behaviour, which includes learning and making decisions. ML, which is considered a branch or stepping stone to
artificial intelligence, will make RPA bots smarter.

An RPA bot with ML can learn from human experience and improve over time. It is capable of adapting to changing environments. Unlike a simple RPA
bot, it can learn what is right and incorrect in its processing and provide insights. Assume you want an RPA bot with machine learning to handle a batch of
invoices. At first, it fails to recognise addresses in invoices and gives incorrect information for those addresses. You should train the bot to remember the
addresses so that it doesn't make the same mistake again and can process the invoices correctly in the future. Another example: in manufacturing, an RPA
bot with ML produces an incorrect component. Show the bot the right way to do it, and it will learn from its errors, resulting in high-quality, consistent
outcomes. An RPA bot with ML can process both structured and unstructured data, such as images and emotion, and it can be trained to recognise them.

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.

Fig 1: Flowchart describing the machine learning prototype

Despite their oversimplified assumptions, Naïve Bayes classifiers have excelled in a wide range of real-world applications, including text labelling and
spam filtering. They just need a limited amount of training data to estimate the necessary parameters.

Naïve Bayes learners and classifiers can be surprisingly fast as opposed to more sophisticated approaches. Since the class conditional function
distributions are decoupled, each one-dimensional distribution can be computed independently. This helps to alleviate the problems created by the curse of
dimensionality in particular.

Some Naïve Bayes classifiers that are commonly used include:

 In multinomial Naïve Bayes, feature vectors represent the frequency in which certain events were generated by a multinomial distribution. This is
the most widely used case model for categorising records.
 Bernoulli Naïve Bayes: In the multivariate Bernoulli event model, features are Independent Booleans (binary variables) that characterise inputs.

This model, like the multinomial model, is often used for document classification tasks that use binary term incidence (i.e., whether or not a word occurs
in a document) features rather than term frequencies (i.e., frequency of a word in the document).

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4. Literature Survey

Generally speaking, there are 2 types of invoices. Specialized Invoice Processing are configured before-hand to take care of just the invoices; Easy to
maintain and deploy. On the other hand, General Purpose Data Capture is used to recognize either all, or a part of the data provided inside the invoices but
there are some predefined rules as per the vendor; These ones have reduced costs with the ability to be used in other document [15]. The invoice that we
have created is a General-Purpose Data Capture Invoice and in the following paragraph we compare it with Accenture Inc Invoice and Allexis eInvoice,
which lie in the same category.

1. Allexis eInvoice
With the help of the system called eKasa system, which helps in analysing the data in the invoice and also link it with previously stored default invoices,
to trigger any faults if appeared [16]. Goal is to create a digitalized invoice and store into the Tax Authority Database, this in turn helps in eliminating
VAT frauds. They provide a great solution but the catch is that the invoice needs to be scanned to get uploaded and they are not automated. They are just
storing and not comparing results.

2. Accenture Inc Invoice

The main goal of Accenture’s Invoice, is the same as ours, to reduce the number of document usage manually which affects the productivity and the costs.
With the initial invoice process which they provided, involved a lot of mess-up of excel sheets, unnecessary check-ups on mails, and the whole process
took 3 days [17]. So, they came up with “Digital Service Model”, which with the help of ServiceNow Platform, did all the job our invoice does now. They
too have incorporated automation and it proves that it makes the process streamlined, and reduces time and effort drastically.

In the month of March, 2021, our team conducted a market survey where we sent out a google form link to a lot of people who deal with invoices on a
daily business and we asked them the need for an automated invoice and we asked them some questions regarding to it. Following are the insights we
understood. Our first aim was to find out that how the customers store their invoices normally. We found out that, 50% of them Scan every invoice and
store it on any drive available to them, 22% don’t even store, 21% Store the hard copy in a file, and we can make sure to make each and every life easy
over here with automation. Then we asked if they faced any issues with the methodologies followed before, and 79% said yes and replied that most of the
issues were not having the invoice at the right time thus tallying issues or were not able to claim a refund. Following is when we asked if they would
prefer an automated invoice to which 79% opted for yes, 14% saying maybe and only 7% saying no. So, to meet the expectations of our 79%, we asked
what they would prefer in the automated Invoice Process to which some of the responses were:
 Convenience
 All of the details stored correctly and accurate
 Simple
 Easy to use
 Secured

And we again would make sure to make our Automated Invoice Process meets all of the points mentioned above.

5. Problem Statement

Roughly around 80-90% of data in an organization is of forms, documents so to process any document is now a requirement for almost all automation use
cases [18]. The traditional way of processing documents with RPA was to use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) which had a lot of limitations when it
came to documenting formats or detecting scanned text thus without intelligence, OCR is not accurate.
To give it a clear look, all the services that the customer got offered or the goods he or she purchased, an invoice is produced with the details of what must
be paid, as well as the rules and conditions that must be followed. Different systems approach this process differently, but there are a lot of similar
elements; but we do require a more straightforward and uniform approach to invoice preparation.
The following factors have an influence on the result:
 Since there could be more than one actor involved in the creation of an invoice, a list of the actions which might be executed by each actor
must be noted.
 Different payment methods and other conditions may be specified in the invoice, so we must define them explicitly.
 Before sending the invoice, we must ensure that it is complete and in good working order.
 Different people should do the preparation and validation.
 The creator of the invoice must be known.

There might be scenarios where some data on the invoice may be optional, but some are mandatory so that separation must be decided beforehand.

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6. Solution

Our solution is to provide the Invoice Processor with the help of Automation Anywhere where all the robots can be handled easily and with the help of the
schedules page, we can see any robots on automatic run. After uploading the invoice, it gets converted to CSV file and then we check and compare in the
training and testing stage.
A user first produces and creates the invoice on the basis of the already defined rules, after which it is validated by another user. The invoice producer and
the invoice validator are two of the stakeholders involved in this process. These scenarios refer to the following use cases:
1. Making and Preparing Invoice: Following the purchase of goods and the delivery of services, a document is produced that includes all of the
related items and their costs. This step can be completed by a single person or a group of people, either automatically or manually. After
creating an invoice, we must add the goods or services to it and provide additional information for each item on the invoice.

2. Verify the invoice. An invoice must be authenticated by either a system or a person after it has been produced and prepared. This step ensures
that the invoice's quality and completeness are met.

The realization of these use cases is depicted below as a class diagram. The interface for making an invoice is defined by the class
InvoiceCreator. It also allows you to prepare the invoice by adding or removing items, as well as choosing different properties that are used to
determine the invoice's final scope. The Class Invoice is a document that includes all of the goods or services, as well as the nature of each
item. The Class InvoiceValidator is used to ensure that the invoice generated by the preceding steps is in a consistent format that adheres to
the trade usage. Business policies that relate to the preparation and validation of invoices are found in the classes BillingPolicy and Validation
Rule.

Fig. 2: Class Diagram for Invoice Creation [19]

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7. Consequences

The pattern has the following advantages [20]:

 It describes a generic process for creating invoices that can be tailored to a variety of situations.
 During the invoice preparation and ordering process, we can separate specific stages of preparation.
 The invoice creator and validator are roles, meaning they can be performed by the same or different people. They can also be done in a group
setting.
 We can use the separation of duties principle by delegating creation and validation to different users via different interfaces with access
control.
 We can keep track of who prepared an invoice and who verified it.
 This pattern represents every feature of the use case but does not include any implementation details, leaving it open to a variety of
implementation options.
 While there are a variety of ways to create an invoice, this pattern defines an abstract view of the most important aspects and can be
customized to fit any situation.

In terms of the aspects that were not covered, several liabilities of the pattern can be defined, such as [10]:
 Different types of creators and validators. This varies depending on the system, which can range from individual creators to software
programs or organizations (parties).
 The contents of the invoice are determined by accounting procedures.

Fig 3: Creating, preparing and validating on Invoice [19]

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8. Implementation

After merging AI with RPA, we can perform Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) which uses machine learning to clarify, extract data of documents
into structured data. Therefore, here we use Robotic Process Automation with Artificial Intelligence for clear and better processing of documents [12].

RPA provides a platform for payment called Hyperautomation menu which is an RPA solution for accounts payable. As it’s a robot and things are
automated, the data visible is structured in a viewable manner and it is all digitized. Technology behind this follows three steps where the first step is to
Automate wherein the software robots present must replace all of the manual actions. Followed by the step in which all of the data needs to be properly
structured for clear movements moving on. Last step is to Digitize where an automated flow of structured data between suppliers, third parties and the
employees making use of the reports, analytics and decision making should be deployed. All of this will give benefits like reviewing the payment,
authorizing tasks via mobile devices, and many more new capabilities are fruited.

For this project we required a PC with Automation Anywhere Community Edition A2019 Bot Agent, Google Chrome with Automation Anywhere
extension, some sample invoices to process which we downloaded from the A2019 IQ Bot and also the Microsoft excel 2007 to view CSV files.

The process of the project starts by first creating a learning instance where we create one by teaching the AI IQ bot with a few samples. Then we confirm
if the AI learnt it properly else, we map the fields. Then the IQ bot is called ready to process the invoices which are uploaded which can then be converted
into structured CSV files. Then we use a task bot to upload these invoices which we process to the IQ bot learning instance. Here the IQ bot goes on to
process the PDF documents and thus get them into a structured CSV format. Then we use another bot to download the files. Following is a detailed flow
of the process.

Detailed Flow:
Here since automation anywhere is cloud based, we can connect multiple devices across & access the created bots and run the same bot simultaneously in
all devices. It also gives us an advantage to create new bots and also access the already existing ones. Then we create a bot namely Invoice Upload where
we are automatically uploading all the available invoices within the folder and the designated path. Then we create a bot called Invoice Download where
with the help of AI and Natural Process Language to read and convert the downloaded invoice’s portable document format or images into CSV files.
Following up comes the stage where the Invoice Download bot are successfully created and converted. Then we get to look of the result and check and
compare it with the desired result in the training and testing stage. Finally, we see the summary of the invoice and the final result on the Microsoft excel
sheet.

Fig 4: Project Overview [18]

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9. SWOT Analysis

Strength, Weakness, Opportunities and Threats, SWOT, is a framework used widely to assess the businesses four pillars. These four pillars help
understand about all there is to be known. This 2x2 matrix, created after brainstorming every block in relation to our product, will tell us where we stand.

Fig 5: SWOT Analysis

Following is a summary of the actual SWOT analysis we conducted which is Fig 5.

i. Strengths
The automated bot is done by creating an IQ bot using Automation Anywhere thus there is enhanced security and reliability in the bot. The bot
allows to process unstructured data using AI, NLP which allows us to already understand every invoice.

ii. Weaknesses:
Even after being automated, human help might be needed but that is with every robot. Also diversifying the invoices could become an issue, if
ever came up.

iii. Opportunities:
90% of the documents in the organization can be processed. Allows the company to expand into global areas.

iv. Threats:
Difficult to understand if the need of the invoice system will always stay in the company or if there would be another processor. Because of the
success, many companies are now trying to create the same so competitors arrive.

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10. Results

We first created a training instance by giving a few samples of invoice documents for the IQ bot to learn and understand with the help of AI. Then we
moved on to reviewing the mappings, and correcting them, for the AI to learn the fields correctly. This stage is where the IQ bot is ready to process
invoices which are uploaded to it and then has the ability to convert them into structured CSV files. We created a bot called “Invoice Upload” where we
are automatically uploading all available invoices within the folder and the designated path.

Then we have another bot which we created and named it as, “Invoice Download”, in which it uses the AI to read and convert the downloaded invoice
pdf/images into CSV file. Once the Invoice download bot has successfully executed, we can convert the uploaded invoices into Comma Separated Values,
CSV. Then we check the results and check whether the desired results are acquired or not in the training and the testing stage. Then after this we have
finished creating, training and classifying the document for better cybersecurity and moving it into production stage.

Fig 6: Result Checking

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After all of the training and testing when the program runs again, it converts all invoices PDFs into CSV file as shown below. This is also how the system
verifies and validates the invoices.

Fig 7: Sample Invoice

Fig 8: IQ Bot Training Stage

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 Fig 9: Final Result

Below is a graph which will help you understand the training we used better. The color Purple denotes accuracy after training, whereas the color orange
denotes accuracy without training. For the 5 invoice samples that we used, it was found that every invoice had better accuracy after training as compared
to before training. This also proves that the IQ bot has been successful in running the invoices and we can also say our Invoice Processor gives the most
accurate results.

Fig 10: Accuracy Overview

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CONCLUSION

RPA for Invoice Processing will be a very huge benefit as it will continuously monitor for new invoices and will have the ability to capture and evaluate
those invoices; Will also have the ability to make payments if anything is due. The key and the only goal of RPA is focusing on innovation within the
company to cut costs. It improved over time but if there was any change in an invoice line already saved in the data set, it would present a problem to
change this data, resulting in having to remove it and start over again. Using business process automation to manage accounts payable activities reduces
the time needed to process an invoice. Implementing an automation system will save a significant amount of time in terms of searching for an invoice or
hunting it down in the approvals process. Using an automated invoice system, you can customize the accounts payable workflow process to suit your
company's needs. You can route invoices above a prescribed amount to those with proper authorization, create and maintain approval timers, balance staff
workloads, and cross-check and validate payables as and when required, amongst performing other important tasks. Using invoice automation software
comes with a host of advantages such as increased visibility, reduced costs per invoice, ability to control the approval cycle, and optimized invoice capture
with minimal investment and disruption.

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