Automating back-office processes — in particular invoice handling and procurement — is essential for maintaining the competitiveness of private healthcare providers in Hungary and for reducing the administrative burden on clinical staff. This point was made by Lepesi János, project coordinator at EconomySoft, at the Portfolio Private Health Forum 2026.
Why current practice causes problems
Private healthcare institutions face the same business and operational challenges as other market participants: they must maintain financial, accounting, logistics and inventory systems. A sector-specific issue is that procurement and use of services often require the involvement of doctors and nurses. When clinical staff are expected to perform continuous administrative and approval tasks alongside patient care, it creates significant extra workload — leading to delays in procurement and invoice payments and slowing internal approval processes.
In daily practice this appears as time spent searching through emails, lost documents and unclear approval chains, which accumulate into a heavy administrative burden by month end. Many organisations mistake digitalisation for merely downloading and storing PDF invoices received by e-mail; this is only digital archiving, not process automation. Lepesi emphasized that as long as invoices are treated as documents rather than structured data, true automation cannot be achieved.
Data-driven invoice processing and the Számlarobot solution
If documents are treated as data structures that include line items, amounts, due dates, cost centres and projects, they can serve as the basis for well-designed automated processes. EconomySoft’s Számlarobot synchronises directly with the Nemzeti Adó- és Vámhivatal (NAV) data: it processes not only invoice headers but also line items, bank account numbers, credit and amended invoices, and applied exchange rates.
The system can automatically pair invoice images and attachments from incoming emails and perform posting and accounting tasks without manual intervention. Because many private healthcare providers work with foreign suppliers, Számlarobot uses a combined technology of two different artificial intelligence models to process international documents: the two models correct each other’s errors and can extract and structure foreign invoice data with approximately 90 percent accuracy.
The goal of the solution is to have machines carry out repetitive back-office tasks while highly trained healthcare professionals intervene only at critical decision points in the approval chain. As a result, clinicians need only approve fully prepared digital invoices — complete with necessary documentation and proof of delivery — with a single click, even from a mobile phone, and the approved data transfers into financial and accounting systems without human touch.
Integrations and a practical example
Számlarobot currently offers direct integration to more than 19 enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, including SAP, SAP Business One and Devisu. This enables automatic updates of cost centre, project and procurement identifier data in the management software.
As a practical example, Lepesi mentioned Saint James Szemészeti Központ, which implemented the system one year ago to address uncoordinated internal procurement and opaque approval processes. After automation, invoices at the clinic follow fully controlled digital routes, and bank transfer packages are assembled and initiated directly from the system based on approved items.
Conference and further information
The half-day conference "Követeléskezelési trendek 2026," organised jointly by Portfolio and EOS, will be held in September 2026 and marks the event's eleventh year. This year’s programme focuses on the topics currently shaping the industry: the effects of changing economic policy, new regulatory challenges, and the opportunities of AI, digitalisation and automation.
Note: an AI assistant contributed to the preparation of this article; the final content was edited and verified by our journalist.
