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Drastic elimination of labor and risk of construction settlement work! "OCR x AI" opens up a path to "de-paper work" and work efficiency: Accounting / accounting work becomes easier

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Accounting / accounting work for managing the flow of money according to various rules is a work that requires particular accuracy due to its contents. Without accuracy, it will be difficult to grasp the asset status, and various management indicators such as grasping the financial status and recording expenses will be affected.

However, as long as the person responsible for the work is a person, mistakes are inevitable. In addition, although there is a limit to the amount of work that can be done by people, the amount of work in accounting can be enormous, from premium management to cash / deposit management, settlement of accounts, asset management, payroll, year-end adjustment, and tax filing. exist. Based on these, what has been promoted from early on in the field of accounting / accounting is the systematization of work for the accurate and quick execution of a large amount of work.

However, there are definitely some jobs left behind in systematization. A typical example of this is the "construction settlement work," which temporarily records the price paid to the contractor by the time the building is completed.

The bottleneck of automation is the difficulty of "uniform judgment"

There is something in common with tasks that are difficult to systematize. First, the processing includes "paper" -based work. Of course, computers cannot handle paper information as it is.

Another reason is that the rules cannot be applied uniformly. It can be said that systematization of work is automation of work under strict rules by computer, but conversely, it is difficult to automate work that requires flexible judgment, which is handled differently depending on the situation.

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These two are exactly the same for construction settlement work.

The starting point for this work is to grasp the amount stated on the invoice, but in the construction industry, it is still common for them to be exchanged on paper. In addition, "there is a great deal of processing that relies on human experience and know-how," said Yohei Ogawara, group manager at Pro-Ship's System Sales Headquarters.

Looking at the business process of construction settlement work, payments for construction work are first classified into three categories: "common expenses", "repair expenses", and "capital expenditures", and the common expenses are "repair expenses" and "capital expenditures". After appropriately allocating to "", finally set up subjects such as "electrical equipment" and "digestive disaster construction", and consolidate assets into them.

"The decision here is very difficult. For example, if there is a payment in the name of" temporary maintenance cost ", which should be classified as" repair cost "or" common cost "? There is no clear rule there. Depending on how you think about it, it applies to both. Also, the breakdown of the quotation is different for each business partner such as work content, product name, model number, etc. There is no better way than making a judgment based on such things as "Mr. Ogawara" (Mr. Ogawara)

What is the disadvantage that he is born there because he is easy to personalize because he is professional

In construction work, there are hundreds to thousands of quotations for one building, and it is not uncommon for them to finally fit in a thick file. Of course, it takes a lot of time and effort just to register the quotation system. In addition, deep knowledge of both accounting / tax information and company rules is required for various decisions, and it is also a problem that work is concentrated on a specific person in charge and it is easy to personalize.

"In many cases, the person in charge manages the data independently in Excel, etc., so it becomes difficult to verify the accuracy and validity as the process becomes" blackboxed ". Even if there is an error, it is audited. It is difficult to notice until it is pointed out in, and the discovery in the unlikely event of fraud will be delayed by that much. "(Mr. Ogawara)

On the other hand, most invoices are sent at the end of the month. Inevitably, the concentration of processing work during that period also causes an excessive burden on the person in charge.

Against the background of what has been explained so far, the distribution industry, which has many stores, the infrastructure industry such as gas and electric companies, railway companies, and major manufacturers that have many factories, etc. I was in a situation where I couldn't take appropriate measures.

"Since the spread of the new coronavirus infection, the fact that such work is mainly done on paper documents has become recognized as an issue not only in terms of improving work efficiency but also in terms of ensuring employee safety. Masu "(Mr. Ogawara)

From Pro-Ship materials

"ProPlus Smart" that AI proposes a suitable processing method and achieves both efficiency and fraud elimination

Under these circumstances, Pro-Ship has taken the lead in supporting problem solving in accounting / accounting operations. The company's fixed asset management system "ProPlus" is characterized by high functionality that supports tax standards and multiple books in 24 countries, and is No. 16 (IFRS16) of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). It is also widely used in response to the above, and has already been introduced and utilized by more than 5,000 companies in total.

For the construction settlement work introduced so far in this article, "ProPlus Smart" that enables drastic efficiency improvement by OCR for digitization of paper and various AI for work support after digitization. Has been provided since December 2019.

Features of ProPlusSmart (from Pro-Ship materials)

If you introduce the functions of ProPlusSmart along the flow of business, it will be as follows.

The first thing to use is the "automatic posting" function that converts scanned paper documents into text data by OCR for handling quotations and invoices in the system. Character recognition in OCR often supports only specific formats, but ProPlus Smart can read various formats with AI.

The person in charge will check the converted contents, and if there is a misrecognition, only that part needs to be corrected.

The next flow is classified into "common expenses", "repair expenses", and "capital expenses", and the power of this is the "automatic distribution" function through AI analysis of read character strings and amounts. For example, for items that include "removal," "disassembly," and "disposal," AI proposes to include them in "repair costs" based on past distribution trends. It is said to make up.

However, what is distributed and how it is distributed depends on the rules of each company. Based on this point, Pro-Ship borrows actual data from clients for introduction and conducts preliminary verification to ensure improvement in distribution accuracy above a certain level. After the introduction, AI will continue to learn through its use, further improving accuracy.

After that, the "automatic allocation" function is prepared to divide the "common expenses" into "repair expenses" and "capital expenditures". Through the automation of this work, which has taken a considerable amount of time and effort due to the large number of documents to be handled, it is possible to improve work efficiency and prevent mistakes, and it is possible to eliminate arbitrariness that leads to fraud.

The last thing to use is the "automatic integration" by AI for aggregation through the subject setting for each asset, and the "automatic classification" function that proposes suitable subjects for each asset. Of these, the latter presents a number of subjects that are judged to be appropriate by AI based on the learning results for the subjects after aggregation. The person in charge only has to select the one that can be judged to be suitable. In addition, after being recorded as fixed assets, depreciation calculation is carried out according to the contents set for each item. Here, too, we propose a method that AI is expected to be suitable based on the learning results.

"Through selection and result confirmation based on these system-side proposals, it is possible to drastically save labor and significantly reduce the risk of mistakes and fraud. In addition, by accelerating the registration of quotations in the system, at the end of the month It should also realize the leveling of centralized billing operations. "(Mr. Ogawara)

From Pro-Ship materials

Responding to the problems of fixed asset management with various approaches

The effect of introducing ProPlus Smart is extremely large. According to a verification conducted by a certain company, the time required for construction settlement work was reduced by 2000 to 3000 hours per year, or by 30 to 50% compared to before the introduction. According to Mr. Okawara, many companies that have introduced ProPlus Smart have said that "the long-standing concerns have finally been resolved."

Since its launch, it has been continuously expanding its functions. Pro-Ship is energetically working on the so-called "feedback loop" that reflects the user's voice in the service, and ProPlus Smart is no exception. One of them is collaboration with other companies to support the digitization of data.

Ultimately, the company is looking to further improve operational efficiency at all companies through digitalization support such as paper operations. When asked about his enthusiasm for that, Mr. Okawara said, "We will continue to take advantage of our abundant knowledge of fixed asset management, and listen to the voices of users to increase our contribution in this area, while listening to a variety of new products and services. I will connect it to the development of. "

Accounting / accounting area where various harmful effects were born because it is paper. How about moving to a smart business system that suits the times by making good use of Pro-Ship's solutions?

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