Integrate financials and streamline invoice processing

Tuesday, 2 June 2009

Swift Horsman, one of the UK’s most successful specialist contractors, has combined Financial Document Management with Sage Construction’s EVision software to improve the speed of invoice processing

EVision user Swift Horsman provides prefabricated/off-site technologies, fit-out and specialist joinery solutions for the UK’s leading developers, clients, architects and contractors. Communication is important to Swift Horsman which is why the management team promotes the easy transfer of knowledge, information and news through electronic means as well as more traditional routes. With this in mind, Swift Horsman opted to add award-winning Financial Document Management to its existing EVision contract management software. Integration has enabled the electronic storage, retrieval, management, enhancement and delivery of business documents (invoices, purchase orders, statements etc).

This ‘paperless office’ technology allows all types of organisation to reduce the need to print out, photocopy, post and manually file business documents. The benefits of this software include a return-on-investment within just six months, reduced operating costs, dramatically improving efficiency and reducing paper waste.

Simon Green, Group IT Manager at Swift Horsman, says: “We are a premier construction fit-out business and have concurrent operations across a number of geographically-diverse construction sites. This presents a major challenge in terms of managing a conventional paper-based document approval process. Tight integration of financials, particularly streamlining the processing of supplier invoices, was one of the key drivers behind the decision to add Financial Document Management to Sage Construction’s EVision. We wanted to eliminate the need for time-consuming and error prone paper-based accounts payable methods.” 

Indeed, one of the most protracted and costly processes within any organisation is the manual processing of purchase invoices. Inputting purchase invoice data into the accounting system, validating the data, authorising the invoice and then archiving a copy invoice are all extremely time-consuming when done manually. Delays in executing these processes can be even more costly for an organisation, often resulting inreduced supplier discounts and/or severe late payment penalties.

The automated document scanning, imaging and invoice processing solution uses sophisticated Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology to automatically capture invoice data. This is then extracted and validated before the data is exported into EVision and the corresponding image is archived. Invoice queries, rejections and approvals are also updated in EVision to ensure that both the financials and document management system remain synchronised.

Simon Green comments: “We were impressed with the experience and support offered during implementation and training.  Swift Horsman has seen a massive number of benefits following the integration of Financial Document Management with EVision. The more notable of these are greater control because of greater visibility of document status, proactive alerting of outstanding approvals and an improved audit trail; a minimisation of invoice distribution errors and consequential cost; a reduction in approval time meaning an overall faster process to payment cycle; a reduction in processing and document retrieval costs; a reduction in future document archive space requirements; and increased purchase ledger value-add activities such as proactive supplier relationship management. More specifically, Swift Horsman was able to reduce the purchase ledger team which is now able to manage all subcontract invoice processing.”

With a structured corporate social responsibility policy, Swift Horsman is keen to reduce its environmental impact and has therefore been pleased with the software’s assistance to this end - “Our invoice processing solution has also enabled us to minimise our environmental impact by significantly reducing the copying of documents and distributing them by post.”

Asked whether he would recommend adding the Financial Document Management functionality to EVision, Simon Green enthuses: “We undertook an exhaustive analysis of the market place for an invoice processing solution and identified a number of potential suppliers. It quickly became apparent however that no solution provider other than Sage Construction could supply a suite of integrated applications to support our end-to-end requirements. Those organisations seeking to better manage supplier relationships, improve business process visibility and reduce the cost of processing purchase invoices should definitely be investigating the integration of Financial Document Management to complement their EVision solution.”

Sage Construction

Sage Construction, formerly Tekton & part of Sage (UK) Limited, supplies & services software to the construction industry. A wide…

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