What is straight-through processing?
Straight-through processing is when a transaction runs from start to finish without a person touching it at any step, from the moment a request arrives to the moment the record is created and confirmed.
The simple explanation.
Straight-through processing means work goes in one end and comes out the other with nobody touching it. A purchase order arrives by email, the system reads it, checks the customer and the stock, creates the order, sends a confirmation, and books it into the pipeline. Nobody rekeys anything and nobody approves anything, because the case matched every rule on the way through. The term comes from banking, where payments ran this way first, but it applies to any repeatable transaction.
What it takes to get there.
Three things have to be true. The incoming data must be readable and reasonably complete. The rules must be written down clearly enough for software to apply them, including the awkward ones about credit limits and minimum order quantities. And the receiving system must accept the record without a human clicking through screens. Most projects stall on the second point, because the rules live in one experienced colleague's head and have never been said out loud.
Measure the rate, not the ideal.
Nobody reaches one hundred percent, and chasing it usually wastes money. The useful number is your straight-through rate: the share of transactions that completed without a human. Going from zero to seventy percent frees most of the time. The remaining thirty percent are genuine exceptions, and those deserve a person. Track the rate monthly, look at what fell out and why, then fix the two or three patterns behind most of the drop-outs.
The Voltade take
We design for a high straight-through rate on the ordinary cases and a clean handover on the rest. In Envoy CRM that usually looks like an order created and acknowledged automatically, with anything unusual, a new customer, an odd quantity, a price that does not match, landing in a person's queue with the reason attached.
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