Dennison Commercials Ltd
Volvo truck and bus dealer Dennison Commercials provides contract hire and fleet rental solutions, parts and maintenance and operates out of four depots throughout Northern Ireland. The company turned to ReadSoft and ReadSoft partner Adest to help fix issues of lost invoices, missing payments and time spent storing and retrieving paper files.
Dennison Commercials Ltd
company
Dennison Commercials Ltd is one of the oldest and largest franchised Volvo truck and bus dealers in the United Kingdom and Ireland. It has a workforce of more than 130. • Operates out of four depots throughout Northern Ireland • Processes from 12,000 to 14,000 invoices annually
industry
Accounting Finance
product
Content Publishing & Distribution
Challenge
Dennison Commercials Ltd needed to process and store data from tens of thousands of purchase invoices per year. Invoices would arrive in a mixture of post and email. Iain McKinney, Financial Controller, supervises a small team of two that is responsible for maintaining the purchase ledger for four departments, and across all four sites.
“Issues arose in terms of not knowing where invoices were being sent,” McKinney says. ”They would be distributed to depot managers, and then proved difficult to locate or would go missing. We knew we had received the invoice, but could not confirm where it was.”
Also, Dennison had to file all of the invoices received, which was time consuming for the small team. During a visit to another Volvo dealer in the UK, McKinney noted there were so few filing cabinets around. It was because all that dealer’s purchase invoices were being scanned and then shredded
“We thought that was a brilliant idea,” McKinney says.
Iain McKinney Financial Controller Dennison CommercialsWe knew we had received an invoice but could not confirm where it was.
McKinney recognized the need to improve the invoice processing procedure at Dennison, which could streamline the purchase ledger and allow the finance team to spend time on higher-value tasks.
Solution
The project goal was to significantly reduce manual work, reduce total processing time and lower the cost for supplier handling. Dennison approached Adesta ReadSoft partner— which specializes in document processing solutions tailored for SMEs. Initially Dennison opted for a web based version of an Adest product, AdestAP, but problems emerged.
“We found that the click-to-view process was going to be simply too slow for our purposes,” McKinney says. “So we decided to adopt a so-called ‘thick’ client approach, where the software was installed on all relevant PCs instead.”
Using AdestAP to scan and verify, Dennison’s purchase invoices are automatically captured both in hard copy and soft copy and then immediately managed through the finance department’s processes. Adest deployed the capture software ReadSoft Collector, which automatically imports all invoices attached to email—detecting any format, including PDF, TIF, and PNG.
The benefit for Dennison was the creation of a unified email inbox for all invoices. Any emailed data received would then be processed automatically by ReadSoft Invoices in the same way that paper invoices are processed. That meant the same business rules could be applied and incoming invoices could be ready for approval in a matter of seconds. Once data is fed into ReadSoft’s software, validation and verification of the invoices is handled easily, and invoice data is then exported for coding, authorization and approval by Dennison’s accounts payable staff and department managers.
Iain McKinney Financial Controller Dennison CommercialsWe run the program each day. It picks up on all invoices at end of the day which have been approved and these are bulk posted.
Adest managed all integration of the AP software with Dennison’s existing Chorus financial management and enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. The purchase ledger is checked against supplier statement to ensure they match. Then, once input is done and data is captured, the financial team is able to search by amount or document number— all uploaded into the Chorus system.
“This has made it very easy for us to find invoices,” says McKinney.
Results
“With the invoices under control and coded correctly, it has now become the role of just one person to maintain the purchase ledger because we are no longer having to file invoices,” says McKinney. “From my perspective as Financial Controller, I am able to deal with more credit control calls.”
Overall, he says there is less demand on the staff at month end because they are not chasing down invoices.
“We just have to export data to Excel and create an accrual point at the end of the month,” McKinney says, “and that is now very easy because of the increased accuracy of the figures.”
Looking back, Iain says he is very pleased about the rollout of the project.
“It has freed up our time to concentrate on the business at hand,” he says, and that now means putting pressure on suppliers to provide all invoices via email, to reduce even further the need for scanning.”
Iain McKinney Financial Controller Dennison CommercialsIt has freed up our time to concentrate on the business at hand.
Industry-leading business process automation
In 2014, Lexmark International, a global technology leader, acquired ReadSoft, a leading provider of applications for automating business processes. Together, they become an unmatched solution for financial process automation. Lexmark enterprise software, hardware and services remove the inefficiencies of information silos and disconnected processes, connecting people to the information they need at the moment they need it. This case study reflects ReadSoft products and positioning at the time of acquisition and has been approved for use.