Large Nationwide Distributor Fully Automated Process to Store AR Invoices

When generating over 500,000 Accounts Receivable Invoices per month, a need to become efficient is essential.

Current processes of printing, scanning, indexing and storing Accounts Receivable invoices were behind. Accounting Staff needed access to the invoices electronically the 1st week, not the 4th week.

Customer Profile

Large Nationwide Distributor of over 350,000 Food Products. Over 60 locations serving all 50 states with centralized headquarters in the Midwest. Multiple Entities creating Accounts Receivable documents for Invoices and Credit Memos

Business Challenges in More Detail

Accounting Staff is tasked with searching and retrieving AR Invoices to answer customer questions. Questions by customers are typically generated within the first 10 days of the AR Invoice creation. An understaffed department was tasked with attempting to keep up with the scanning and data entry of more than 500,000 AR Invoices per month. Once an Invoice was generated in paper it was taking 4 weeks to be available in the electronic document system. The task of printing and scanning AR Invoices was simply taking too long and the understaffed department was unable to provide the proper level of service causing a strain on the Accounts Receivable staff.

Solution

Upon the initial Discovery Process it was discerned that the AR Invoices needed to be processed overnight so that they would be available to the Accounting Staff the next day. On-Line Imaging provided some education to the customer regarding C.O.L.D processing of computer files. On-Line Imaging worked with the customer to determine that there was a way to capture the print stream of the AR Invoices electronically into an ASCII text file and in turn then saved into an output folder as an automated process. FileBound Importer Pro would then monitor the output folder on a set schedule. Importer would analyze the ASCII text file and automatically burst and index each page of the file. Once the parsing is complete the file would then be uploaded to FileBound and stored as a 1kb text file. In FileBound an AR Invoice Template is applied to the text file as an Overlay. The entire new process is fully automated.

Benefits

Since the entire process is now automated, the costs to print and scan the paper ceased to exist. Storage savings were realized immediately, a scanned document averages 50kb to store. The new C.O.L.D based AR Invoices stored take up 1kb per document thus cutting storage from 25 GB per month to 0.5 GB per month. The customer immediately was able to repurpose staff to handle core job functions. The efficiencies gained by the AR staff was realized on the first day because the AR Invoices were available immediately. AR staff can now answer customer questions while they are on the phone with them as all AR Invoices are available at their fingertips.