Scanning invoices for accounts payable is usually placed at the end of the process, as an archiving step performed when there is time, and that placement is the reason it accumulates. Moved to the front, before entry, it stops being archiving and becomes capture: the document is in front of the person coding it, the fields can be read off it rather than typed, and the record is complete from the moment it exists. Nothing else about the process has to change for that to help. This page is about the move, what it changes, and the objection that usually stops teams making it.
At the end, scanning is archiving and gets deferred
A task with no downstream dependency is the first thing dropped in a busy month. That is why unscanned paper accumulates in teams that are otherwise well run: nothing stops working when it is not done, until somebody needs a document.
At the front, scanning is capture and cannot be deferred
If the invoice is scanned on arrival, entry reads from the scan and the record carries the document from birth. The task now has a dependency, which is what makes it happen. This is the whole of the change.
The objection, and the answer
The objection is that scanning first adds a step before anything useful happens. The answer is that it replaces a step later and removes the backlog entirely. On the worked example on this site, 400 invoices at three touches of six minutes with a 12% exception rate is 134.4 hours a month, $4,300.80 at a $32 loaded rate and $10.75 an invoice. and a deferred scanning queue is invisible in that figure while being real work.
Questions people ask about scanning invoices for accounts payable
What if invoices arrive by email already?
Then most of this is solved: the PDF is the scan. The equivalent discipline is filing it against the record on arrival rather than leaving it in the mailbox.
Who should do the scanning?
Whoever opens the post, and it should take seconds per invoice. If it is a batch job somebody schedules, it has drifted back to being archiving.
Does this need special hardware?
A multi-page scanner with a document feeder helps and is not expensive. The bottleneck is almost never the hardware.