Automating the processing of purchase invoices and the sending of sales invoices reduces cost and frees up time to spend on more business critical tasks.

“We were working from 7 o’clock in the morning and Sundays to get all our invoices processed manually. Now we only have to deal with around 6% of invoices and even those are automatically filed.

Strategically our focus can now be on more critical tasks like credit control. Definitely more people would have been needed to cope with growth. Our service levels to customers and the business have also increased.”

Managing higher volumes of purchase and sales invoices with less cost and more flexibility

  • Espace Global Freight Limited are an international shipping company based out of multiple locations in the UK, with an expansive global network of appointed agents and freight forwarders. Espace provide European road, sea and air freight solutions to over 500 UK and European customers.
  • Constantly looking at ways to innovate, offer better and more competitive solutions to their customers and to stay ahead of competition, Espace had highlighted the amount of paperwork in their office as a real weakness.
  • Processing 5 to 10 invoices was a half hour job. Matching an invoice and passing it for payment, taking out the POD/CMR, making copies, attaching them to the sales invoice, which could often be difficult to find, was a very long -winded process. Espace were looking at how they could speed up these processes and were very keen to automate.

Espace started implementing the DMR purchase invoice automation service in June 2012.
The service is integrated with their freight forwarding software package (Multifreight) which means all invoices are automatically matched and posted to their estimated costs for the job.

Invoices are archived electronically for easy reference and viewing by operators and accounts staff.

Paper invoices are scanned to a dedicated network folder and along with invoices received in electronic format (email, PDF, EDI or XML) they are automatically submitted for processing using DMRLink.

PODs and CMRs sent with purchase invoices are separated from the invoice, masked where necessary (using the DMR masking service) and automatically associated with the relevant sales invoice.

Sales invoices are then transmitted to the customer electronically either with or without the PODs and CMRs depending on how the customer wants to receive them.

Espace are now able to trade totally electronically in the most environmentally friendly way.
As a result of automating the processing of purchase invoices, sales invoices and their associated documents Espace have been able to;

  • easily cope with business growth,
  • introduce new services with confidence,
  • focus more actively on credit control and
  • enable the accounts team to work more flexibly improving employee engagement.

Savings are estimated at around £40k per annum through staff productivity.

“We see DMR as our closest business partner and their “can do” attitude has really helped Espace. We just know that our ideas are going to be looked at and things will happen.
That’s what we like!
We would never go back to the way we were.”

 

%d bloggers like this: