Here’s the situation: Your financial institution does business with dozens of vendors ranging from audit firms and IT consultants to the pest control company. Maintaining healthy vendor relationships depends on timely and accurate payment, but invoice routing and approval can be tedious—especially with manual, email-based processes. This playbook article explores how to streamline vendor invoice management with FASTdocs from Alogent.

Play #1: Simple Invoice Routing

With the FASTdocs Workflow Library, a collection of pre-configured workflows, banks and credit unions gain access to out-of-the-box invoice routing. Let’s see how this works for a relatively straightforward situation: processing a small invoice ($500) from a long-time vendor.

Here’s the Game Plan

Step 1: The vendor emails a PDF invoice to your accounts payable team. Although FASTdocs supports a variety of imaging options, your AP team has a monitored inbox for invoices that automatically brings it into FASTdocs and places the invoice into the “vendor invoices” folder.

Step 2: FASTdocs identifies the document as a vendor invoice, prepopulates certain metadata fields, and prompts the user to enter additional index values. For this use case, entering the invoice amount is particularly important. Data can be manually keyed in by the user, but FASTdocs also offers OCR and AI-enabled capabilities.

Step 3: An approver in the AP department reviews and approves the invoice. Since the $500 invoice amount falls within the AP department’s approval limit, FASTdocs automatically saves the document to the “approved” invoices folder.

Step 4: The “approved” invoice in FASTdocs triggers notifications to relevant stakeholders, such as staff who are responsible for preparing and mailing checks.

Play #2: Multi-step Invoice Routing

What about invoices that require approval from more than one person? For example, let’s imagine that your financial institution just upgraded its computer hardware for the commercial lending team. Your technology vendor submitted a detailed invoice for $7,500, which must be reviewed by the VP of IT.

With FASTdocs, your AP team simply follows the same basic steps outlined in the previous play. However, since the invoice amount exceeds your predefined approval threshold (i.e., $5,000), AP staff will be prompted to assign an additional approver. In this case, the VP of IT is selected.

FASTdocs notifies the VP of IT about the invoice. Upon approval, FASTdocs automatically saves the document in the approved invoices folder and distributes notifications. Disapproved invoices are saved in a “rejected” folder, initiating an alternate step in the workflow.

Explore Other Prebuilt Workflows in FASTdocs

Interested in automating processes across your financial institution? Download our FASTdocs Workflow Library industry paper, which details pre-configured workflows for document QC, document deletion, resume review, and other business processes.

Learn more about FASTdocs

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