Industry: Retail
Solution: Microsoft Dynamics Business Central | Document Capture 365
Staff Size: 350 employees
Highlights:
The client used Quickbooks Online for its accounting operations for 4 of its companies but were spending up to 3 hours a day just manually processing piles of invoices and consolidating them in Microsoft Excel for analysis.
Systema Solutions modernized its ERP system with cloud-based Dynamics Business Central and automated its invoice processing with OCR text recognition software using Document Capture 365.
The client's finance team now only spends 15-30 minutes per day on invoice processing and is now contributing more towards actually analyzing the business, further improving efficiencies, spotting trends or digging into expenses.
In 2018, the brewing company underwent internal reorganization that brought its four companies together under one head office. This move surfaced the inability of its current processes to support its growing business needs especially with consolidated financial reporting and invoice processing. That was the situation facing this brewing company prior to modernizing its accounting operations and implementing software solutions for invoicing. Its corporate controller realized that the inefficient manual processing of an entry-level accounting system is suppressing their ability to scale and provide more value to the business.
He turned to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, working with Systema Solutions and Continia to roll out a forward-thinking digital transformation strategy for their accounting team.
Manual processes hindered the company’s growth
The brewing company was using entry-level accounting system Quickbooks Online. Its corporate controller recalls that each of their finance staff were spending up to three hours a day on payables related activity alone. With the growing volume of payables that needed to be processed daily, the current process will mean having to hire additional payable clerks, which will mean additional costs for the company.
Their finance team also had to run reports through Quickbooks but had to dump every single one of them into an Excel file to be able to analyze it which were prone to errors and were time-consuming.
The manual, inefficient accounting process hindered their finance team from being truly strategic in their roles as they spent a large chunk of their time just encoding data into Quickbooks.
From 2-3 hours to 15-30 minutes per day
The brewing company chose to work with Systema Solutions to modernize its financial operations and was chosen for its local presence in Calgary, its technical expertise and responsiveness to their needs. Systema Solutions delivered the actual implementation and configuration to make Dynamics Business Central work for them and its strategic partner Continia, provided the OCR text recognition software called Document Capture 365.
“One of the biggest drivers for us in choosing Systema Solutions is that they’re a local resource, they’re responsive and if there’s anything you need done in the system, you can do so because they know Business Central quite well”, said the brewing company's corporate controller.
Since implementing Microsoft Dynamics Business Central and Document Capture 365 with Systema Solutions and Continia over a five-month period, payables processing is now down to 15-30 minutes per person per day.
“The team was probably spending 2-3 hours a day on payables type related activities. With Dynamics Business Central, it’s down to 15-30 minutes per person per day,” said the corporate controller.
This combined solution allowed the brewing company to reduce multiple touchpoints and manual invoice processing. With Dynamics and Continia combined, invoices that come in can be directly sent electronically for approval since the OCR already scanned it, and the invoice already has the needed coding.
Document Capture 365 is set up in the company's accounting inbox, so whenever a PDF email attachment is received, it automatically pulls into Dynamics Business Central for processing. The company's finance team no longer has to download the invoice or upload it anywhere as it directly sends to one of the four companies it believes that the invoice is for based on the text it recognizes.
Becoming strategic partners of the business
One of the massive wins for the brewing company with moving to Dynamics Business Central is its ability to consolidate reports while staying lean with its current four-person finance team. Dynamics Business Central has allowed their business to get rid of the manual report creation and analysis they used to do with Quickbooks. The new system also added more rigor and controls in the company as it continues to grow, with its built-in audit trail and improved accuracy with the OCR.
“Dynamics Business Central and Document Capture 365 allowed us to scale our accounting function as we continue to grow. It’s freeing up our accounting function to be more of a strategic business partner to the team”, says their corporate controller. “We’re no longer spending too much time just processing payables or performing data entry, which is low-level value to the business. Our people are now able to spend more time actually analyzing the business, looking at trends, or digging into expenses to help improve the efficiency in the business”, concludes their corporate controller.
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