Automating, Simplifying and Streamlining Complex Invoicing Process

 

Large businesses have complex requirements when it comes to financial processes, especially when dealing with high invoice volumes. Without automation, issuing and handling accounts payable, quotations and budgets can become time- and labour-intensive. 

When one of Acrontum’s internal teams, supporting the invoicing of a large German automaker, realised that they were being bogged down by their time-intensive, non-standardised invoicing process, they knew they had to turn to the Acrontum development team for assistance. 

 

BACKGROUND

The automaker offers digital automotive services to their customers, supported by Acrontum’s Management, Licences and Content (MLC) team. At the time, the team was dealing with more than one hundred suppliers, multiple budgets and an influx of daily invoices. This sensitive information was shared among team members in the department via internal communication channels and then manually uploaded to Excel spreadsheets. 

As the team spent a disproportionate amount of time on relatively simple manual tasks, there was little time to invest in more critical strategic tasks, such as the analysis and verification of data. The approach was not only time-inefficient but posed a significant risk of data loss, data entry errors and data privacy breaches. 

The client supports substantial corporate budgets, with several different departments using different Excel sheets. Excel sheets are not the best tool for the task at hand, as formulas could easily break or be overwritten, leading to inaccuracy. Giving and managing permissions in Excel is not always possible, despite the sensitive data the Excel sheets contained, and only one person could access Excel sheets at a time. Payments were often delayed due to the laborious process. 
Fortunately, Acrontum had both the ability to design cost-effective, custom-made tools and the necessary client knowledge required to quickly and efficiently automate these processes and reduce the time spent on simple manual tasks. 

GOALS

As the budget was limited, Acrontum’s goal was to create a cost-effective tool that would streamline processes for the client and make it easier for the MLC team to process the invoices of their various service providers, and for the client, in the long run. 

The MLC team wanted to automate the repetitive, manual tasks and processes within their department as much as possible, by implementing basic automatic validations. This included automatically determining whether or not the available budget would be sufficient to cover the invoice and to verify the invoice against the client’s information. 

APPROACH

Acrontum decided that the best way to tackle the problem was to create and build an application that would interlink information and present a unified view from a single, central location. Tasks would be standardised and automated, e.g. the process of creating a budget. 

The application would not only assist the MLC team with their day-to-day tasks but would also assist the client-side teams in standardising, organising and accessing information. 

STRATEGIES

Acrontum spent several one-on-one sessions with various agents to capture the process and pain points and integrate with the client’s financial management software, provided by SAP. The process was illustrated, reviewed and iterated several times to capture all of the steps and relevant stakeholders. Due to budget restrictions, the scope was focused on value generation with maximum data security. 

Within three months, the new Operational Financial Planning (OFP) application was launched, saving hours of manual effort every week. It remained robust for more than a year without significant change requests and can be scaled at any time without vast re-investigation or conceptualisation. 

RESULT

The Operational Financial Planning application has centralised all of the information with extended feature functionality for invoice validation. Processes are standardised, automated and deployed in the OpenShift Cluster, making it highly secure. 

Notifications ensure that deadlines are not missed and alert users when potential problems are detected. The MLC team has more time to gather and analyse valuable data, and the client has more time to spend on strategically important initiatives. 

Payments are approved, verified and made more quickly, which has streamlined efficiencies and improves supplier relationships across the board.