The assumed starting point
This example assumes a wholesale business with 45 employees and 600 incoming documents per month. Capture and review currently take four minutes per document. Varied formats and missing details make a dependable exception process essential.
How the workflow could work
A possible capture workflow extracts agreed fields and uses fixed rules to check formats, totals and duplicates. Well-prepared documents enter human review with visible source locations. Uncertain documents remain in the existing manual process; posting and payment take place in the established business system.
The intended result
The calculation assumes that 80 percent of documents can be handled in 1.5 minutes each, including review. The remaining 20 percent still take four minutes. After two hours of monthly maintenance, the calculated time capacity is 18 hours. The 80 percent is an assumption, not a demonstrated extraction accuracy rate.
The example calculation
600 × 4 / 60 − (480 × 1.5 + 120 × 4) / 60 − 2 = 18 h/month
- 600 items per month; previously 4 minutes per item.
- 80% of items: 1.5 minutes including human review and correction.
- 120 exceptions still take 4 minutes each in the manual process.
- 2 hours of ongoing monthly maintenance already deducted.
- Assumed values to verify in a pilot. Assess setup and software costs separately; available working time is not guaranteed cash savings.
What the pilot must verify
The pilot includes duplicates, cancellations and unreadable attachments. Reprocessing must not create duplicate records. People decide on posting and payment approval. Setup effort, software costs and any additional rework must be assessed separately.
