State-of-the-art AI technology for skilled trades and ancillary building trades

pds GmbH, a lead­ing provider of indus­try solu­tions for the main and ancil­lary con­struc­tion trades, has inte­grat­ed smart INVOICE, the solu­tion for invoice pro­cess­ing from Insid­ers, into its own ERP solu­tion pds Soft­ware. This allows pds to unlock the ben­e­fits of inno­v­a­tive AI for trades­men and busi­ness­es in the main and ancil­lary con­struc­tion trades and to sup­port their cus­tomers with a far-reach­ing process opti­miza­tion.

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The indus­try solu­tion pds Soft­ware ful­ly cov­ers all craft and busi­ness process­es: from cal­cu­la­tions, dig­i­tal pur­chas­ing, ware­house man­age­ment, resource plan­ning and the ser­vice and main­te­nance busi­ness to mea­sure­ment and billing and, if desired, with inte­grat­ed finance and human resources.

The vol­ume of incom­ing doc­u­ments in the indus­try is con­sid­er­able. Par­tic­u­lar­ly sub­stan­tial in num­ber and page count are ven­dor invoic­es due to pick­ing and mul­ti­ple items. How­ev­er, prompt pro­cess­ing of these doc­u­ments is cru­cial for the speed of the company’s own invoic­ing: if the prices and quan­ti­ties of pur­chased mate­ri­als are not record­ed and checked, the billing of ser­vices to the cus­tomer can­not take place either. This is detri­men­tal to liq­uid­i­ty, and a delay in the pay­ment of ven­dor invoic­es means that promis­ing cash dis­counts are giv­en away.

For auto­mat­ic doc­u­ment read­ing, pds was there­fore look­ing for a pow­er­ful soft­ware com­po­nent to inte­grate into its own ERP solu­tion and, after eval­u­at­ing alter­na­tives, decid­ed on smart INVOICE as the tech­no­log­i­cal­ly lead­ing prod­uct. PDS was there­fore in search for a pow­er­ful soft­ware com­po­nent for auto­mat­ic doc­u­ment read­ing that could be inte­grat­ed in their own ERP solu­tion. After eval­u­at­ing alter­na­tives they decid­ed on the tech­no­log­i­cal­ly lead­ing prod­uct smart INVOICE.

Thanks to the inte­gra­tion of smart INVOICE, the data of incom­ing invoic­es no longer has to be entered man­u­al­ly. The solu­tion auto­mat­i­cal­ly reads out invoice data such as ven­dor, invoice num­ber and date, pur­chase order ref­er­ences, tax rates and totals as well as the indi­vid­ual item data and much more, and checks it for plau­si­bil­i­ty. In case of doubt, employ­ees can val­i­date or sup­ple­ment the auto­mat­i­cal­ly read data via col­or cod­ing in an edit­ing screen that is ful­ly inte­grat­ed into the pds soft­ware. The doc­u­ments with the read data are then trans­ferred to the invoice receipt book for fur­ther pro­cess­ing. Option­al dark pro­cess­ing enables ful­ly auto­mat­ed post­ing and pay­ment of invoic­es. In addi­tion, smart INVOICE can receive, read and check elec­tron­ic invoic­es in all rel­e­vant for­mats – such as ZUGFeRD or X‑invoices in par­tic­u­lar.

Auto­mat­ed doc­u­ment read­ing opens the door to a com­plete dig­i­ti­za­tion of the entire process – from order­ing to pay­ment. This makes the indi­vid­ual steps not only sig­nif­i­cant­ly more effi­cient, the pro­cess­ing stage of a trans­ac­tion is also trans­par­ent at all times. The total time required to process ven­dor invoic­es is dras­ti­cal­ly reduced. “By inte­grat­ing smart INVOICE into our pds soft­ware, our cus­tomers in the skilled trades and ancil­lary con­struc­tion trades ben­e­fit from state-of-the-art AI tech­nol­o­gy at enter­prise lev­el,” says Jörg Bilz, Man­ag­ing Direc­tor at pds GmbH.

Cur­rent­ly pds process­es around 3 mil­lion invoic­es per year for its cus­tomers – some of them with con­sid­er­able page counts – effi­cient­ly and large­ly auto­mat­i­cal­ly with smart INVOICE. The trend is strong­ly increas­ing. In the sum­mer of 2023, the com­pa­ny plans to switch to the Insid­ers Cloud Ser­vice for smart INVOICE and will then ben­e­fit from even eas­i­er scal­ing, faster avail­abil­i­ty of tech­ni­cal inno­va­tions and always opti­mal con­fig­u­ra­tion by the man­u­fac­tur­er.