Does anyone use any AP Automation software add ons that work really well - we are a manufacturing company with 100’s of invoices that come in that we manually match. Looking for different alternatives for a solution to cut employee time.
We use the Epicor ECM(Docstar) product and a customized AP workflow to get the job done. In combination with the IDC (OCR) module and a new receiving paperwork workflow we were able to reduce the errors and time required to 3-way match the AP. (We are also MFG and do 100+/wk in AP).
We think it works real well, but we’re not doing the line item level OCR and automatic matching - our vendor invoices are a mess to begin with and we’ve not tried doing the line-item stuff yet.
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We are into implementing a solution with an external firm. (NOT an IT decision… but management )
The process:
- we send daily , at 20h00, text files containing our supplier list, our po list and our reception list.
- in the morning, payable agent send the invoices received in pdf format.
- the external firm interpret it all and send us back the results in individual XML files at night…
The following is temporary until we can do this automatically…
4) We read the XML files, containing the header info and the lines info., and generate the DMT import files for Group, InvHead and InvDtl
3) We do a DMT import of the files
There is still a lot of work left to be done (like automation) … but that is the general idea…
This seems very long winded.
I agree… like I said… not an IT decision… 
Maybe get management to take a look at https://www.prismsoftware.com/products/workpath/ we use this and automate several manual tasks.
Full API support which means things are done instantly.
We use IDC/ECM from Epicor and it has vastly improved our AP load. I went for the non touching and non approval workflow as our POs are all pre approved and started with a limit of $500 to make sure it was good and that limit is now $5000 and we are planning on moving up to 20K fully automated this month.
We like it enough to spring for SO automation which I am implementing now.
I wrote (well more like mostly borrowed from @MikeGross ) my first workflow to automate our indexing of daily packing slips and receipts into ECM. We do 100-150 receipts a day and the workflow will do 90% without issues leaving 10-15 that have to have some human intervention in indexing and even that is faster than looking up and dragging the PDF to the receipt which they had done before. Next is job packets with a work flow. If you are looking at ECM my one regret is not spending the $200 on the barcode module when I did SOA. I am almost positive that would take the scanning accuracy to 100%
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Laura …. More info for our AP automation discussion
Kate Labrecque
Controller
Habco Industries, LLC
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I’m giving this topic a bump here again towards the end of 2023 as we are looking into AP Automation again after a failed DocStar implementation several years ago. We are going to looks at ECM v2 but we will also be reviewing other solutions. Is anyone using any 3rd party AP Automation solutions that work well with Kinetic?
Im talking to Epicor tomorrow about ECM / Docstar for an AP Automation solution.
I guess I would want to know why the DS implementation failed? IDC and ECM are both better now than when I started with them in 2019.
Their out of the box generic solution which was mostly what v1 was worked for certain scenarios. V2 is very Epicor centric, but IMO is too fancy for my streamlined approach. In my case I found I had to drive what I wanted and not take the out of the box solution.
As I have posted before we took what ECM was good at and did not try to make it all things in AP.
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This is also what I found. I think they stretch it just a bit calling it AP automation when it’s not as complete of a workflow as the concise naming of it suggests. Listen to Greg’s comment and @Banderson 's latest posts about all the tweaks he’s had to do to get things to work that work just fine if you were to enter the invoice directly into Epicor.
ECM “AP Automation” can be made to automate the AP workflow, there’s no doubt about that, but it’s not as complete as I think it should be given the way they are naming it and pitching it.
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We also use IDC/ECM
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Thank you for all of your replies. We are looking at ECM again… we have sent our CAM a list of things that did not work for us in v1. We are still waiting for a response from our CAM on this.
We will be looking at other solutions too. I will follow-up here once we decide what were are doing with AP Automation.
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As this is about AP automation, I would like to post to this thread. We have had a DMT template to upload AP invoices. However, for invoices of landed costs (airfreight), after uploading the invoice, we need to manually add “late cost lines” then “add allocation grid” ( input pack slips’ number) and click “allocation cost” in EPICOR. The allocation must be done for each late cost line and 1 invoice has multiple late cost lines. We have not been able to define a tool to automate this allocation process in EPICOR yet and would highly appreciate if you can advise or comment a potential lead.