International incoming invoice processing without language barriers

In a guest article by TCG Process GmbH, author Marcus Kern presents a communication solution for international incoming invoice processing.

Electronic invoice processing – what the European Day of Languages and international incoming invoices have in common

Invoice, Rechnung, factura, Faktura, räkning, számla, Счет-фактура, 发票…

Well, how far could you follow? First of all, there is nothing to worry about, because the above terms are only relevant in the respective country. However, it is becoming increasingly important for global corporations to roll out system-supported business processes internationally. Basically, international invoice processing in corporations and today’s ‘European Day of Languages’ pursue the same goal.

The European Day of Languages was celebrated for the first time in 2001 and since then annually on 26 September. The aim of the day is to maintain and promote linguistic and cultural diversity in Europe and beyond. Multilingualism and intercultural understanding are to be promoted and also supported. In Europe alone there are over 200 languages and an even greater variety of dialects.

However, the diversity of languages worldwide increases the complexity of everyday business for international corporations. Simple invoicing suddenly requires employees with intercultural interpretation skills and flawless language skills.

Electronic invoice processing – the TCG solution for international incoming invoices

With TCG’s solution for international invoice processing, DocPro Star Invoice, which is used in the SAP solution extension SEEBURGER Purchase-to-Pay and in SEEBURGER’s Invoice Portal Service, TCG is also pursuing the goal of promoting multilingualism and, above all, international growth for companies. In accordance with the objectives of the Council of Europe and the international growth objectives of companies, we would like to offer the possibility to digitally process documents from different countries in different languages in one process.

A decisive factor for a successful solution roll-out is the reliable extraction and interpretation of the documents in the respective national language. The translation of the software interface plays a subordinate role here. The focus is on the multilingualism of the interpretation component, which is capable of automatically processing documents, such as invoices, in different languages and from different countries.

Electronic invoice processing with DocPro Star Invoice – functions for all languages

The devil is in the detail: the languages must be known to the system, as must document-specific special cases. Invoice-specific words, date formats, etc. are included in a country package so that all information can be extracted correctly – just as quickly on a Chinese invoice as on an English document. However, the language alone is not the deciding factor.

With English invoices, for example, it makes a big difference whether the invoice comes from the UK or the USA. The UK works with the date format dd.mm.yyyyy, whereas the USA uses mm/dd/yyyyy. Such and other country-specific regulations must be included in a fully automated invoice processing system.

TCG country packages enable this for automated invoice processing with the DocProStar Invoice solution. Over 30 country packages are currently available. For other document types, from input management to P2P, we can implement international language packages together with our customers.

A country package contains the detection of:

• font
• language
• document-specific terms
• headers and footers
• position data
• totals

Electronic invoice processing with OCR technologies for the recognition of international fonts

With regard to the font, the software has almost no limits. Thanks to extensive OCR technologies, Cyrillic or common Asian fonts can also be reliably recognized if required. This ensures language competence beyond Europe for your company.

The self-learning technology integrated in DocPro Star successively improves the recognition quality during operation. With validation and correction by the user familiar with the respective country, the position and content for invoice fields are captured freely with the lasso. In future use, these fields are known to the system and are learned automatically. Thus the usual capture work experiences a continuous quality improvement.

Even more is possible: country-specific checks for the respective tax are possible with DocPro Star. Please contact TCG GmbH to find out more.

There are no limits to your internationalization strategy with DocPro Star.

Sales Contact TCG Process GmbH
Marcus Kern
Regional Sales Manager
Neubriach 4
88255 Baienfurt

Electronic invoice processing with TCG and SEEBURGER – Your eloquent team for international assignments

SEEBURGER is an experienced provider of integration solutions. We have been working with TCG GmbH in the field of document capture and processing for several years. For example, we use DocProStar Invoice in our cloud solution Invoice Portal Service. As a long-standing certified SAP partner, we also offer certified extensions to the SAP standard and thus integrate DocPro Star Invoice deeply into the SEEBURGER Purchase-to-Pay solution for SAP.

Source: https://blog.seeburger.com/international-incoming-invoice-processing-without-language-barriers/