Best Practices for Managing Invoices

Looking to get the fastest and most accurate invoice processing out of Ottimate? Here are five tips to make everything run smoothly:

1. Use Vendor Emailed Invoice PDFs

Many vendors like US Foods and LA & SF Specialty provide electronic copies of invoices via email or through a web portal. These electronic PDFs can be processed almost instantly by Ottimate. If you have access to electronic PDFs, send them directly to your Ottimate invoice email address or download them from your vendor and then upload them to Ottimate on a regular basis.

Note: To obtain your unique email address, Click Upload from the home page. The email is shown.

2. Upload regularly

Uploading every other day or even daily ensures that Ottimate does not run into bottlenecks by receiving lots of invoices at the same time. Uploading regularly not only ensures that your analytics and reporting will stay up to date, but also makes invoice management less of a chore.

3. Avoid marks near critical invoice data

Ottimate's OCR system attempts to process everything on a page. That means it tries to make sense of check marks, handwriting, and stamps, even if they weren't intended to be read. Keeping marks to a minimum will help Ottimate extract your invoice information effectively.

4. Don't upload duplicate invoices

Ottimate has processes in place to identify and remove duplicate invoices. However, because weeding out duplicates requires manual verification, they take longer to process. Plus, they waste your team's valuable time as people upload the same item multiple times.

When working with paper invoices, we recommend creating dedicated "new" and "uploaded" folders. As invoices are scanned and uploaded, move them from "new" into "uploaded" so you'll always know where they are in the process. For invoices sent via email, we recommend setting up auto-forwarding rules that automatically send a copy of your invoice to Ottimate when a vendor emails it to you.

5. Improve scan quality

Scan quality has a big impact on how well Ottimate can use OCR (optical character recognition) to read your invoices. Scans should be clear, in focus, right-side up, and un-creased. When reviewing invoices, if you see the same blotches or lines on multiple invoices, it is likely that your scanner has dirt or debris on the glass. A quick wipe down with Windex may help.