What is Touchless processing?
Touchless processing means a purchase invoice is handled from arrival to posting without a human opening or changing it. The touchless rate is the share of invoices for which that works.
Also known as: straight-through processing, STP rate, automation rate, no-touch
It is the most honest metric in invoice processing, and at the same time the easiest to bend. A recognition rate says how well a system reads. A touchless rate says how much work actually disappeared. The two can be far apart: an invoice can be read perfectly and still pass through three pairs of hands because the coding was uncertain and somebody had to approve.
The question to ask about any rate is what the denominator is. Do approved invoices count as touchless when somebody had to press a button? Are credit notes included? Are the invoices the system never recognised as invoices, and that therefore never entered the statistic, included? Without those answers a rate is a marketing number, including ours.
In Exact Online
For Exact Online, touchless means the invoice arrives, is read, is coded with GL account, VAT and optionally cost centre, is optionally matched against a purchase order and goods receipt, passes the approval rules, and appears as a purchase entry in Exact Online without anyone opening it. Everything outside that is an exception with an owner.
What knocks an invoice out of touchless
It is almost never the recognition. In practice there are four causes, in this order of frequency.
- Coding the system was not confident enough about, usually a new supplier or a new line type.
- A difference against the order or receipt outside tolerance.
- An approval rule that requires a human signature, which is a choice and not a failure.
- Something about the document itself: a credit note, a consolidated invoice, two invoices in one PDF, or a page scanned askew.
Why one hundred percent is not the goal
Part of your invoices should be seen by a human. A new supplier with a large amount, an invoice that belongs to no order, a bank account that changed. Chasing one hundred percent means switching those checks off, and that is exactly the kind of saving that becomes very expensive once. A healthy goal is that everything routine runs by itself, and that your team’s attention shifts to the exceptions.
Where it usually goes wrong
- 1Confusing recognition rate with touchless rate. The first is technology, the second is process.
- 2Quietly shrinking the denominator by keeping difficult invoices out of the measurement.
- 3Steering on the rate instead of on cycle time. An invoice posted touchless but late helps nobody.
- 4Switching controls off to lift the number. That is not automation, it is moving risk around.
Frequently asked questions
Common questions about Touchless processing.
Questions about your situation?
Open the demoThat depends entirely on your invoice mix. A wholesaler with many recurring suppliers and purchase orders lands far higher than a services firm with many one-off invoices. Compare your own figure this quarter with last quarter; do not compare it with a rate from a brochure.
Take every document that arrived and was meant as a purchase invoice, including the ones the system did not recognise as such and including credit notes. Of those, count the invoices that appeared as a posting in Exact Online without anyone opening the screen. That number is lower than what vendors quote, and it is the only one you can steer on.
We say no, because a human was involved. Many vendors do count it, because it is a deliberate process rule rather than a system failure. More important than the answer is writing down which definition you use, so the number stays comparable across quarters.