3-way matching is an essential and important step for every business when they are doing accounting. The process can be tedious. However, you can use natural language processing to help you match your invoice lines.

What is Natural Language Processing?

Natural language processing (NLP) is a branch of artificial intelligence that helps computers understand, interpret and manipulate human language. NLP draws from many disciplines, including computer science and computational linguistics, to fill the gap between human communication and computer understanding.

What is 3-Way Matching?

Three-way matching is a procedure for processing invoices to ensure that payment is complete and accurate. The goal is to highlight any inconsistency in documents in the purchasing process.

The documents could be purchase orders, order receipts, and invoices. This procedure is done in order to prevent businesses from overspending or paying for something that they did not receive.

This may sound simple to a human, but if you want to automate this process, it can get complicated. One of the complications is to match the invoice lines to the receipts lines and the purchase order line.

Sometimes, invoice lines may not exactly match the description of the product description in your system. If you have the part number, it will be easier to match.

However, if the part number matches with your database’s number but the product description is different, how do you match? How much difference can you accept before you deem that it’s not matchable?

You can solve these complications by using a Cognitive Automation software like Gleematic. The smart text comparison function will be able to match lines even if there are extra spaces in the text line.

Our software can also match the text even if the words are not in the right sequence. This way, you will be able to have a higher matching rate.

And for your understanding, here’s an example of how cognitive automation bots do the 3-way matching:

3-way-invoice-matching-using-natural-language-processing-1

What are the advantages of smart text matching?

Since the process of 3-way matching can be fully automated, it is better than doing it manually. When using smart text comparison, it will provide you with a matching score. If the score is too low, the system can reject it and alert you to double-check.

Using smart text comparison is cost-effective as the software requires little time to train and set up and can be used with any form of text. It will also save you time as your employees can focus on more important tasks!