Save time and automate receipt and invoice processing with our improved AI camera feature

Payhawk’s new AI camera: Automated invoice capture and data entry

If finance teams don’t have visibility over expenses, they can’t effectively spot spending habits, analyse or track spending, and look for patterns to support forecasting.

And if your business still relies on manual receipt capture, this undoubtedly plays a big part in any lack of visibility. Receipt data entry is time-consuming and error-prone, making it super inefficient for businesses of any size, especially those that are scaling.

AI (artificial intelligence) technology revolutionises the expense management process by removing unnecessary human interference, minimising errors, eradicating the need for manual data entry, and streamlining your entire spend management system.

This blog explores how Payhawk’s new AI camera technology upgrades the expense management process.

The biggest receipt capture and data entry challenges

In business, one thing you need above all else is accurate financial reporting. Without it, you can’t forecast, plan, or grow.

Manual receipt collection and data entry is slow and subject to human error, meaning tracking spending accurately and reporting in real time is almost impossible.

Data entry errors cost time and money to correct. Time that could be better spent elsewhere, such as rolling out strategy, collaborating with non-finance colleagues on ROI analysis, and business forecasting.

Take the innovative e-commerce company AIOPSGROUP for example. Pre-Payhawk, they needed help with financial visibility and tracking spend. But with our card and expense solution — including automated image recognition for receipts and invoices, they now save two hours daily and achieve real-time reconciliation. That’s roughly 43 hours a month saved.

Or arts fabrication company MDM Props. Before Payhawk, Finance Manager Uchenna mentioned that missing and incorrect receipts meant the company lost out on big VAT reclaims. “Before Payhawk, missing receipts meant missing VAT reclaims, with quarterly tax bills of up to £240K, that's massive. Now with Payhawk, our cardholders upload receipts in seconds and save the business hundreds of thousands.”

Introducing Payhawk’s AI-powered camera

Our new AI camera can help remove these inefficiencies and level up your expense management processes. There’s no need to photograph and reshoot your receipt images, it doesn’t matter if there’s poor lighting or your paper is creased; our AI-powered camera will capture, extract data, crop, and generate expense reports before your eyes in seconds.

The improved AI-powered camera perfectly complements our OCR technology within the Payhawk app, helping users instantly capture and crop receipts in seconds, extracting all the relevant expense information at speed.

The useful new feature means your expensing process is even quicker. All your employees need to do is snap and upload a receipt (and select a spend category from a dropdown set by your business). The system then generates an automatic expense report leaving your finance team with an accurate catalogue of expenses.

Five benefits of our AI-powered camera

An AI-powered camera benefits everyone — employees, CFOs, your finance team members, you name it; anyone involved in spending company money will find this addition transformative.

1. Save time: The AI camera instantly eliminates manual data entry by capturing receipt details. As your organisation scales, expense volumes increase, and using our AI-powered camera will help you reduce the processing time.

2. Improve accuracy: Accuracy is crucial when extracting finance data; one error can create a long line of tasks to correct it, draining precious resources. With our new and improved scanning capabilities, you can capture accurate data, including numbers and dates, even if receipts and company invoices are crumpled. This reduces the risk of errors, removes unnecessary delays in expensing, and makes the accounts payable process more efficient.

3. Streamline workflows: Using AI for invoice processing can enhance overall efficiency because you no longer access inaccurate receipt information, and users aren’t delayed by manual data entry. Instead, everyone’s job automatically blends into the same workflow, i.e., when one user has completed their action; it’s pushed to the next part of the workflow for someone else to complete their part.

4. Enhance the user experience: This update to our camera removes the frustration of having to retake receipt photos due to poor lighting. The user-friendly interface is also quick and straightforward, making it easy for everyone to track and manage their expenses, whether in the office or on the go. All these features help increase employee adoption rates into your corporate cards.

5. Automate invoice data entry: OCR technology (optical character recognition), together with our AI-powered camera, means data is automatically entered into expense fields, allowing reports to be automatically generated. Automating these admin-intensive expense tasks eliminates human error and captures data correctly.

How the AI camera works

The AI camera is straightforward to access and use; here’s a breakdown of how it works:

1. Launch the camera from within the Payhawk app*
2. Capture the invoice or receipt, and the AI algorithms will analyse and crop the image, extracting all relevant data, including dates, total amount, merchant name and more
3. The employee then submits the expense without having to enter any data manually.
4. This submitted data generates automatic expense reports, helping streamline your expense management process

*Existing customer? Update your Payhawk app on Android or iOS to access the new AI feature.

What does the future look like with Payhawk?

We’re laser-focused on providing innovative solutions for our small, growing, and multinational enterprise customers. And with our new AI-supported features, we’re helping them easily streamline processes and boost productivity, empowering employees and financial teams to focus on more critical initiatives.

Like the sound of saving time and money on your expense management processes? And getting full spend visibility and control? Say goodbye to poor productivity and welcome AI-powered expense management; book a demo to find out more.