OCR invoice processing is the step everybody starts with, because it is visible, demonstrable and easy to buy. It is also, in most payables teams, not the step where the time goes. Placing it correctly in the flow, between the invoice arriving and the match being attempted, makes it obvious what it can and cannot fix, and stops a capture project being asked to solve an approval problem.
The five steps and their elapsed times
Arrival, capture, match, approval, payment. Capture takes minutes. Matching takes minutes when the documents exist and days when they do not. Approval takes days, because it waits on somebody outside finance. Payment happens on a schedule. Timing your own five will usually show capture is a small share of the elapsed time, however large a share of the visible effort it feels like.
What capture unblocks downstream
It is still worth doing, because structured fields are what let the match run automatically and what let an invoice be found later. Its value is largely as an enabler for the next step rather than as a saving in itself, which is a different argument from the one usually made for it and a more durable one.
When capture really is the bottleneck
High volume, mostly non-purchase-order invoices, keyed by hand into an accounting system by one or two people. There the keying genuinely is the constraint and capture pays back quickly. The way to know is to measure minutes per invoice by activity for a week rather than to assume.
Questions people ask about ocr invoice processing
Should we automate capture first or approvals first?
Whichever your own timing shows is the constraint. Teams that keyed everything benefit from capture; teams whose invoices sit waiting for a signature benefit from routing.
Does capture help with invoices that have no purchase order?
It removes the keying but not the approval, which is the expensive part for those invoices. The benefit is real and smaller than for matched invoices.
How long does implementing capture take?
It varies with how many source channels and formats you have. Consolidating arrival channels first usually shortens it considerably.