Accounts Payable automation
Customer challenges
Rapid growth
Cost control
Distributed team
Our customer was faced with a rapidly growing business, which was great, but as the business grew, so the costs and associated Accounts Payable (AP) invoices.
The customer had tried the old proven 3 way matching solution of using a PO, AP and Goods Receipt. Unfortunately, it just didn’t seem practical to have PO’s for everything. They gave us the example of when they needed to call a plumber in the middle of the night, because all the toilets were overflowing at one of their sites.
Options
We discussed with the customer some options. One was to eliminate where possible invoices. We had just finished a project where we moved to suppliers electronically sending in very detailed, but fully consolidated invoices each month. This wasn’t really an option, as this customer had thousands of suppliers ranging from mum and dad businesses to multinationals.
Standing PO’s - set the maximum amount per month for each supplier
Mobile phones to allow PO’s to be created when working in the field
Automate the process
Solution
We sourced the appropriate data capture technology that would use OCR to extract meta-data.
Created a workflow management solution to ensure the correct delegation of authority.
Integrated the invoices into the finance system.
Developed key reporting as required for management.
Project challenges
As the customer was growing rapidly, the delegation of authority was not well defined. It started off as simple, any invoice over $10k must be approved by the CEO. That soon became a real bottleneck!
Along with growth, more roles had to be added into the workflow. This made the original workflow harder to manage. When staff were on leave, invoices weren’t getting approved. This customer prides themselves on treating their suppliers like their customers; so it was a real concern to them.
Quality of data - we all knew from the beginning that the quality of the OCR would be challenging. What was actually more challenging was the way each line manager would categorise their expenses. Who would have expected that 50 managers would pick the same GL code for invoices from Bunnings?
Data capture
Customer challenges
Rapidly growing
Managing new businesses with disparate systems
Urgency to act
Our customer needed accurate and timely information in order to properly manage operations - who doesn’t?
In this case, it’s their primary role, as they are management consultants who help both turn-around struggling businesses and improve the performance of others.
As new businesses were taken under management, there wasn’t the time or budget to allow for a change of finance and or operational systems.
The interim solution was to ask all managers to enter data into spreadsheets via dropbox.
The spreadsheet and dropbox solution was very labour intensive and also prone to error. There were also issues with the dropbox synchronization; sometimes changes would be over-written by other users.
Solution
Our solution was to propose the building of an internal (intranet) portal.
The value in the portal would be the ability to integrate historic data from existing systems and present it in a format that would allow users to easily enter forecasts and results. Data validation ensured that ‘crazy numbers’ couldn’t be added accidently.
The data which was entered was then imported into the customer’s BI and reporting tool.
Project challenges
Testing - end users weren’t keen to test. They expected everything to work exactly as they imagined.
Authentication - unfortunately, the customer didn’t run a secure Active Directory service which we could use to authenticate. Therefore, we needed to have a password management system. Many users would forget their passwords. Also, at many sites (which is all too often, common) shared logins would be used.
