As each organization grows, so does the number of documents received and processed inside the company. Regardless of whether there are invoices, bank statements, sales offers, or official letters, they should be sent to the responsible employees or appropriate departments. However, that is often not as obvious as it seems at a first sight. In consequence, companies are dealing with routine but time-consuming tasks. Therefore, automated document classification is a perfect solution for the proper assignments of the documents. Let’s take a closer look at it.
What is the document classification used for?
The answer to the question to which department a particular document belongs seems to be obvious: the CV should go to the HR department, the invoice to the accounting department, and the sales inquiry goes to the sales department.
However, quite often happens that the person who is responsible for answering corporate emails or incoming documents distribution must decide on an ongoing basis and manually send the received documents to the appropriate departments. These, quite tedious and repetitive, tasks that can be easily automated by using dedicated tools, such as NAVIGATOR. This kind of platform allows office employees to save a lot of time and, in consequence, fulfill their potential while performing more complicated or even strategic tasks.
Where the document classification would be the most useful?
Office document classification
Document classification is obviously used for sorting and distribution of office documentation.
Among office documents that might be digitalized the most popular are contracts, letters, and accounting documents. Once the document is uploaded to the system, machine learning algorithms assign it to the proper category. The accuracy is based on the previously registered documents. The algorithms analyze the employees and department chosen by the user earlier and assign the new documents to the appropriate classes. This eliminates the need to repeat the activities that were already done in the past.
Accounting document classification
Among all the documents processed in the office, the automated document classification is the most applicable for the accounting documents classification.
No wonder, since the vast majority of these are invoices.
Therefore, usually, a system like NAVIGATOR can recognize the department in the company to which the document should be assigned based on the contractor, type of purchase, or assortment. What is also important, this classification allows for a much more efficient distribution of invoices to specific companies’ divisions, which are responsible for performing economic transactions.
Adequate criteria for document classification
One of the best criteria for the office document classification, especially in the case of invoices, is the issuance entity of the document.
Particular divisions often perform business transactions with the same contractors based on long-term cooperation. The artificial intelligence features are extremely useful in this matter as well. These techniques capture the relationship between documents and the categories to which they may be assigned. The configuration includes both recommendations of the right place for the registered document as well as sending it directly to the appropriate department. How does it work?
Once the algorithm recognizes the invoice from the uploaded contractor, it classifies it into the department that cooperates with them. However, if the contractor is unknown, the machine learning mechanisms determine the most probable place for the registered invoice based on its content.
What document classification tools should I use?
Two significant matters should be taken into account when choosing an appropriate solution for the document classification. First of all, the system should allow adjusting its functionality to the specific needs of the organization, and secondly, the tool that supports it should be effective and accurate. This is the only combination that will enable an improvement of document circulation within the company. All these conditions are perfectly fulfilled by the document classification system based on AI solutions, available in the NAVIGATOR platform. Why?
First of all, because it allows adjusting the way documents are categorized and full customization of the functionality of the system, so it could perfectly correspond with the company’s needs. Some operations could be performed even without the knowledge and effort of the user, basing entirely on historical operations.
Additionally, the system is supported by advanced tools for extracting data from invoices, e.g. information about the contractor (VAT ID, name, or address). These data are most often used for assigning documents to appropriate divisions. That’s why the capturing of this information enables minimizing the need to engage the user in tedious and repetitive activities, additionally capturing dependencies that are not necessarily obvious and easy for a human to determine.
However, that’s not all. The OCR tool used in NAVIGATOR (described in one of the previous articles) ensures the highest quality of text used for document classification.
Summary
Automated document classification is certainly able to increase the efficiency of office work and minimize the risk of mistakes, primarily supporting the user’s work through recommendations based on the analysis of documents using artificial intelligence technology.
These types of solutions will undoubtedly be used in high-quality workflow systems, allowing to redirect human resources to much less obvious and repetitive tasks.
Finance and Accounting graduate from the Cracow University of Economics. An accountant at Archman daily and financial clerk in Computer Science and Econometrics bursar. In her job uses the NAVIGATOR system for maintenance of personnel documentation, accounting, invoicing, and managing document circulation in the company. She develops her competencies in accounting and taxes.
Data Scientist in WeDeliverAI team (Archman), enthusiast of mathematics, statistics, and new technologies. Finished AGH University of Science and Technology with a degree in Computer Science and Econometrics; Machine Learning module graduate at WSEI Programming School. In everyday work, he prepares algorithms based on machine learning, used in NAVIGATOR system – solving problems regarding process automation.
