Intelligent Invoice Documents Processing Employing RPA Technologies

The applications of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) are many and growing every year, covering banking and financial operations, insurance functions, auditing processes, logistics planning services and more, but automating invoice processing is still more challenging. However, different structure, the variety of keywords, the abundance of types of information makes the detection and retrieval of the information very complicated. Therefore, the currently solutions currently work well with predefined document structures. The aim of this study is to develop a solution based on RPA, Optical character recognition (OCR) technologies and deep learning methods for automated invoice processing without being bound to a specific document structure. The study focuses on five key fields of invoices that are most important to identify and read. The results showed that almost 83% of all invoices used in the experiments were processed correctly. In terms of the results for the detection of individual field information, the best results were found for the “date” and “total amount” fields, with 93.21% and 87.81% respectively, but the detection of the “seller” and “buyer” fields is complicated and requires extensive additional research. Experiments evaluating the document processing time of human the developed robot showed that the performance of human document processing decreases with the volume of documents processed, while the RPA time is almost constant. RPA is 1.76 times more efficient with 500 documents and 2 times faster with 1000 documents.