Why Businesses Should Embrace Intelligent Document Processing Now, Not Later

One of the biggest strengths of IDP is that it directly empowers multiple core departments:   

Procurement: Procurement teams deal with a flood of documents—RFQs, purchase orders, order confirmations, delivery notes, supplier contracts, and more. An IDP solution like Netfira doesn’t just scan these documents; it actually understands them and applies business logic. This means it can extract every line item, cross-check details against POs or inventory data, handle unit conversions and currency differences, and flag any discrepancies automatically. Instead of buyers and procurement engineers spending hours verifying order confirmations or chasing missing info, the IDP platform orchestrates the entire workflow end-to-end. The Netfira Platform, for example, uses inbuilt business rules (tolerances, data enrichment, validation steps) to achieve 100% accuracy in data extraction. This orchestration frees procurement staff to focus on strategic sourcing and supplier relationships, rather than paperwork. It also improves transparency in the supply chain—every document is logged, matched, and easily searchable, which strengthens supplier trust and auditability. 

Accounts Payable (AP): Nowhere is paperwork more ubiquitous than in AP. Invoices, whether PDF or electronic, must be matched to POs and delivery receipts, approved, and recorded. Manual AP processes are slow, error-prone, and costly, often resulting in late payments or mistakes that impact the financial supply chain. By implementing IDP in AP, businesses can automatically capture invoice data, perform 2-way or 3-way matches against purchase orders and goods receipts, and even automate approval workflows. This leads to faster invoice processing times, early payment discounts, and fewer supplier disputes. Crucially, as e-invoicing becomes standard (and mandated in places like Germany), an IDP solution ensures you can handle structured electronic invoices as easily as PDFs. The Netfira Platform, for instance, can ingest an e-invoice embedded in an email, automatically detect it, and prioritise that over any attached PDF – ensuring full compliance with upcoming regulations while maintaining efficiency. The system can then archive the e-invoice and even help generate compliant outbound invoices if your ERP can’t. The result is a transparent, streamlined AP process that keeps your finance team happy and your suppliers happier. In fact, companies that switch to automated document processing in AP report improved accuracy, cost savings, and a higher ROI on their finance operations. 

Customer Success / Order Management: Customer-facing teams, such as sales operations or customer success, also stand to gain enormously from IDP. Every time a customer submits a purchase order or a signed contract, someone must enter that data into internal systems and initiate fulfillment. Delays or errors here directly affect customer satisfaction. An IDP solution like Netfira can capture and process customer orders automatically, populating your CRM or ERP with correct data within seconds. For example, it reads the order, extracts line items, quantities, delivery addresses, etc., and integrates seamlessly with your order management system. This speed and accuracy lead to better order accuracy and faster fulfillment times (See our Product Demonstration: Customer Orders – Netfira). In practice, that means fewer shipping mistakes, fewer returns, and more on-time deliveries – all of which boost the customer’s experience. Moreover, customer success teams often deal with documents like support contracts, service agreements, and onboarding forms. IDP can automate the ingestion and validation of these documents too, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks. By eliminating the administrative burden, your customer success reps can concentrate on what matters: proactively engaging customers and resolving their issues, rather than doing data entry.