CloudTrade, the leading provider of cloud based e-invoicing and e-document processing services, today announced the launch of its Cloud Capture service that will enable customers and their suppliers to process 100% of all their invoices through CloudTrade’s platform.

CloudTrade’s partnership with Mitie’s Document Management business will add Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and data extraction capabilities to CloudTrade’s patent protected e-invoicing and e-document solution, enabling users to process all human-readable documents and to extract data from structured and semi-structured documents.

The partnership is borne out of aligned values and a close working relationship which benefits both organisations and their customers by providing an agile solution, catering for all inbound invoices.

David Cocks, CloudTrade’s CEO, says: “There is no doubt that the business and environmental impact of practices, such as paper invoicing and paper purchase orders, have rendered them unsustainable and hugely unproductive; and that e-invoicing and e-documents are a modern, innovative solution to the paper problem.

“Optical Character Recognition (OCR) offers us another way of interpreting human-readable documents and to extract data from them. Our Cloud Capture service allows us to extract data from scanned images of structured and semi-structured documents, meaning our users can now process 100% of their invoices through our platform.”

Richard Manson, CloudTrade’s Commercial Director, adds: “To date, our patented technology has enabled documents, supplier invoices and customer orders, to be received as text PDFs and automatically converted into an e-document structure. We map the data embedded within the PDF as created by the originating system and convert this into a format accepted by the recipient.

“As this approach is so simple and non-disruptive to any supply chain, adoption rates are extremely high when an organisation promotes this method of e-invoicing. However, it was important to integrate OCR capabilities, as it would be fool hardy to predict that there will ever be a truly paperless office. Some paper will likely remain – at least in the short term.”

James Gilding, Managing Director of Mitie Document Management, said: “We already have an industry leading platform for processing paper invoices and have been exploring opportunities to leverage this service and integrate it with an e-invoicing platform. This partnership with CloudTrade provides a great opportunity enabling us to offer a complete solution to our clients to cover all their invoicing requirements.”

Electronic and automated invoice processes can result in savings of 60-80% compared to traditional paper-based processing.  CloudTrade’s software is protected by lasting patents in Europe, the U.S. and Australia.