The Challenge
As one of Denmark’s leading food wholesalers inco had become bogged down in processing over 100,000 invoices annually, which would trickle into accounts payable in a wide variety of formats: paper, PDF, EDI, e-mail, etc. Any discrepancy or billing error would bring the payment process to a standstill as employees lost valuable time sorting out issues.
Although inco had been scanning supplier invoices into MultiArchive for years, there was a need for a solution to automatically match invoices with the purchase orders already in the ERP system.
“Thanks to Nextway, we went from 12 people to 4 in accounts payable.”
— John Svendsen, CIO, inco Denmark
The Process
According to John Svendsen “Our working with Nextway has been about much more than just IT or accounting. Its purpose had to do with our main objective: improving workflow efficiency. It’s about us taking control of processes that are vital to our vendor relationships and to our bottom line".
The Solution
An analysis by Nextway revealed the potential to simplify workflows significantly, and to reduce the man-hours spent on reconciling invoice errors by upgrading and reconfiguring both the scanning software and the workflow solution. This optimization allowed inco to predefine a total of 12 invoice error types.
Importantly, the new solution was designed to catch and correct minor invoice errors automatically. For the errors the solution could not immediately correct, automated workflow processes were established to reconcile or correct them in a matter of seconds.
The Result
40% of all invoicing was fully automated on the first day of implementation, says John Svendsen:
“All of our invoices are now treated in the same way, no matter what their original format is. PDFs, e-mails, EDI or XML — and of course, scanned paper documents. All invoices now are ready for approval, without ever being touched by human hands. As a result our accounts payable department has gone from a full time staff of 12 to 4 employees today.”
— John Svendsen, CIO, inco Denmark
