Cushman & Wakefield is a leading global real estate services firm that delivers exceptional value for real estate occupiers and owners. In the United Kingdom, their Business Rates Management (BRM) Area provides a service to clients with large national real estate portfolios that includes the management and payment of business rates to local councils.

The annual rates demand documents are predominantly paper-based, requiring Cushman & Wakefield’s Ratings Team to process over 10,000 demands from 400 different Government Departments and Councils over a two-month period. The demands are opened, sorted, manually reviewed, compared to estimates in the Riverlake Rates Management system, and either rejected or approved and paid. Once processed, the paper demands are filed away, making them difficult to retrieve quickly whenever queries arise later in the year.

The format of a rates demand document is similar to that of a vendor invoice, which suggests the use of invoice-scanning artificial intelligence (AI) software would allow for the digitization of rates demand processing. However, while the captured fields are similar in nature to those of a vendor invoice (e.g. property description and address, billing authority, rateable value, and total due), there are significant differences in a practical context.

One crucial disparity is the itemization of payment installments, which is sometimes written as a table (similar to line items), a multi-column list, or in other unprecedented formats.