Within companies, invoicing is a key business process. This is often non-trivial, as incoming invoices arrive at companies at a variety of different points and, due to the associated approvals, can go through lengthy routes before being booked, and - although with shorter lead times - essentially the same is true for outgoing invoices.
This has long been a manual process, accompanied by frequent time-consuming email changes and recording procedures. However, KPMG SmartXtractor can help improve the efficiency of the process at several points.
SmartXtractor is a business solution based on the National Tax and Customs Administration's mandatory invoice reporting. The development periodically downloads invoice data from domestic partners in an automated way, so that up-to-date information is available from the moment the invoice is issued and can be compared with what is known or not known about the invoices, because they are still circulating somewhere in the maze of emails or approvals.
One of SmartXtractor's functionalities is to check whether the invoices entered in the books match those in the NAV system, in which case the test is whether all the invoices have been entered. Essentially, we are comparing two sets of invoices and examining the extent to which they match or diverge. It is possible, especially for incoming invoices, that they may get stuck somewhere, not being recorded in the company's management system, so the procedure helps in short-term cash flow management and in the closing process to 'map' efficient cost accruals.
As a next step, SmartXtractor can also replace manual invoicing. An efficient use case could be, for example, to pre-record received electronic or paper invoices at the push of a button, following internal approval processes, based on the data reported to NAV, thus reducing the amount of manual work.
The other function compares the common elements of the two sets, i.e. the booked incoming and outgoing invoices, with the information also available at the NAV, thus building detective control functions into the business process. In this case, our solution performs an identity check, i.e. we look for the answer to whether the invoices reported to the NAV are fully identical to those recorded, as it is possible that an invoice is incorrectly booked, key information such as the gross total, payment deadline or currency may be mismatched. Once implemented, these control processes will also be fully automated.
In summary, SmartXtractor will bring significant efficiency gains to the domestic invoicing process and will allow new, fully automated controls to be built.
