Automated invoice processing with machine learning : Benefits, risks and technical feasibility

Sammanfattning: When an organization receives invoices, accountants specify accounts and cost centers related to the purchases. This thesis investigated automated decision support with machine learning that gives suggestions to the accountant of what accounts and cost centers that can be used for invoices. The purpose was to identify benefits and risks of using machine learning automation for invoice processing and evaluate the performance of this technology. It was found that machine learning-based decision support for invoice processing is perceived to be beneficial by saving time, reducing the mental effort, create more coherent bookkeeping, detect errors, and enabling higher levels of automation. However, there are also risks related to implementing automation with machine learning. There is a high variety of how accounts and cost centers are used in different organizations and an uneven performance can be expected due to that some invoices are more complex to process than others. Machine learning experiments were conducted which indicated that the accuracy of suggesting the correct account was 73–76%. For cost centers, the accuracy was 50–62%. A method for filtering machine learning output was developed with the aim of raising the accuracy of the automated suggestions. With this method, the limited amount of suggestions that passed the filter achieved accuracy up to 100%.