Delivery and mobility / Ride-hailing and delivery
Uber: Entering and checking supplier invoices
- Company
- Uber
- Country
- United States
- Adoption stage
- In operation
- Source published
- Date basis
- The date the source was published. It can differ from the date adoption started.
- How the source was checked
- Read the full source text
The work problem
Uber has a wide supplier network worldwide and has to process a large number of invoices every day. Even after automation, a considerable share of invoices still had to be handled by people. Human handling raises the risk of error and leads to financial discrepancies and reconciliation problems. The average handling time for one invoice was long, so delays were large too.
Technology and data
Uber fine-tuned and compared several LLMs including seq2seq, Meta Llama 2 and Google Flan T5. In the end it chose the OpenAI GPT-4 family, which was better on accuracy and adaptability. Extracting text from document images is handled by the in-house Vision Gateway CV platform. The whole process runs on TextSense, the in-house shared document processing platform, and the workflow, which branches in several directions, is managed by Uber's Cadence workflow platform. A human check was kept in place. A separate screen was built where a reviewer puts the original PDF and the values the model extracted side by side and compares them. Once confirmed, the values pass to customer systems for further processing and payment.
Results
Uber said the average handling time for invoice processing fell by 70 percent. Compared with manual work it said costs were cut by 25-30 percent. It said invoice processing that people touch fell by 2x. Overall accuracy is 90 percent. Of the invoices submitted, 35 percent reached accuracy close to 99.5 percent and 65 percent reached accuracy above 80 percent.
Limits and open questions
The 90 percent is an overall average accuracy, and not every invoice is finished without a human check. Uber said it will move to fully automatic processing only for cases that have met 100 percent accuracy in the past.
Sources
- Advancing Invoice Document Processing at Uber using GenAIuber.com, Accessed
Compiled from public sources. These are not results from ATF Works customers.