Published on ABC Money (UK), 5 August 2026 — written in collaboration with Uniksystem.
Intelligent document processing solved extraction years ago. Between eighty and ninety per cent of new enterprise data is unstructured, and modern AI reads it with 98-99% accuracy — yet most organisations still process it by hand. Our latest article, now live on ABC Money, argues that the bottleneck is no longer reading the document. It is everything that happens after.
The numbers that make the case:
- Manual invoice processing costs EUR 12-30 per document; automation brings it down to EUR 1-5. At 5,000 invoices a year, that is EUR 50,000-125,000 saved on a single process.
- The full cycle — receipt to payment authorisation — compresses from 7-14 days to 1-3 days. That 70-80% reduction comes from routing and parallel approvals, not from faster scanning.
- The IDP market reached EUR 2.1 billion in 2024 and is heading for EUR 2.9-3.8 billion by 2026, with 63% of Fortune 250 companies already deployed.
Extraction is 30% of the problem
The piece makes an argument that cuts against how most document projects are sold. Extraction is roughly 30% of the problem. The remaining 70% is validation against business rules, routing to the right handler, approval, exception management when data is incomplete, compliance checks, and archiving with the right retention policies. That is the last mile, and it belongs to BPM — which is why organisations that deploy intelligent document processing as a standalone tool report incremental gains, while those that wire it into a workflow report transformation.
And it shows the pattern already in production. The Uniksystem InvoiceRouter qualifies the accounting record end to end: cost centre and general ledger account assigned from learned supplier rules, VAT rate and tax code resolved, credit notes travelling the same flow instead of becoming exceptions somebody fixes by hand, and the entry exported posting-ready into SAP. In one SAP catalogue we integrated with there were 40 distinct reverse-charge codes, all of them intra-community, with none at all for imports from outside the EU — a distinction a clerk in a hurry will not make reliably at four in the afternoon on the last day of the month. Alongside it, more than 90,000 non-compliance cases a year across seven Portuguese banks, with near-100% accuracy on unstructured extraction.
Reading the invoice was never the hard part. Qualifying it is — and that is the last mile.