Process Automation Case Study
Automate entering Vendor Invoices into Quickbooks
The Challenge
A client in the residential construction industry, processes approximately 1,500 – 2,000 invoices per month from suppliers. Manually entering these invoices at 2 minutes each, takes about 50-70 hours per month. All purchases are from 5 different suppliers. The vendor invoices are e-mailed to an accounts payable email address at the client. How do we automate entering these invoices?
Solve’s Solution
Solve developed a process and wrote a couple of applets to greatly improve the speed and accuracy of this process. We did this by breaking the process down into its key components.
Our process looks something like this:
The user starts the process, the application steps through the contents of the accounts payable inbox and examines each invoice to determine who the vendor is.
Each vendor has its own template, and the application uses the correct template to extract all relevant information into a spreadsheet.
This process continues until all invoices have been added to the spreadsheet. All E-Mails are moved from the inbox to a different folder.
The user opens up the spreadsheet, reviews/updates the job and purchase order information, which have been highlighted if they do not find a match in Quickbooks. Checks the totals for reasonableness. Then saves the spreadsheet.
Another applet is then launched which imports each invoice into Quickbooks, attaches a copy of the invoice to the Quickbooks invoice.
The entire process requires less than 1 hour per month.
There are other procedures and controls in place for approval and final disbursement.
The Cost
As one of our Managed Services clients, this client was eligible for our discount pricing on Applets. (Applets are light weight single purpose programs). For this Applet, their monthly cost only increased $149.99. A net savings of $900.00 per month with a huge improvement in accuracy, staff utilization and happiness.
