Mailroom automation software is easy to evaluate against the wrong criterion. Classification accuracy sounds like the thing to compare, and it matters, but the failure mode that actually costs organisations money is a document that arrived, was not confidently classified, and sat somewhere nobody was looking. The right test is what the software does with the things it is unsure about.
Rules that are readable
Routing rules should be legible to the person who maintains them: this supplier to this entity, this document type to this queue, anything from this address to this owner. Rule sets that require the vendor to change them stop being maintained, and unmaintained routing sends documents to people who left.
Queues with named owners and ages
Every queue should have a person against it and an age on each item, including the exception queue. A shared inbox visible to eight people is not a queue; it is a place where everybody assumes somebody else is looking. Age is what turns a queue into something you can manage rather than something you can only feel bad about.
The audit of what arrived
A mailroom is also a record of what reached the organisation and when, which is useful well beyond payables: it answers whether a document was ever received, which is the first question in most supplier disputes. That record should survive independently of whether the item was processed successfully.
Questions people ask about mailroom automation software
Can it handle documents that are not invoices?
It should, and a mailroom limited to invoices simply creates a new gap for everything else. Route other document types to their owners rather than discarding them.
How much configuration does it need?
Enough to encode where your documents come from and who owns each type. If the configuration cannot be maintained by your own team, it will drift out of date.
What about confidential post?
Decide the policy before implementing, because a mailroom makes documents more visible by design. Some categories should be routed unopened rather than digitised.