Challenge

JJ Food Service, supply a range of products including frozen foods, meat and fish, fresh fruit and vegetables, packaging and cleaning products, to all food industry sectors. The growth of the organization was impacting their manual accounts payable process which was processing 90,000 invoices annually, from a variety of different vendors. As invoices arrived into the central office, AP staff manually routed invoices for approval to designated approvers across all 11 locations. The logistics of this process meant that approvals would often take several days, particularly if an invoice needed to be queried by a number of different people. The coding and matching of invoices with purchase orders and goods receipt notes was slow and susceptible to manual errors. Overall, staff had a lack of visibility and control over the AP process and JJ Food Service’s vendors had a lack of knowledge over the status of their invoices, which was affecting vendor relations. JJ Food Services required an automated solution to handle their 90,000 invoices annually.

Solution

SoftCo Accounts Payable Automation processes all of Dairygold’s supplier invoices electronically from capture and matching, to invoice approval JJ Food Service chose SoftCo Accounts Payable Automation to replace its manual AP process, manage their growing number of vendor invoices and to speed up approval times and payments to vendors. The solution processes all invoices electronically from capture and matching, to invoice approval and query management. All invoices are automatically captured, after which a 3-way match is performed with the invoice, purchase order, and the goods receipt note, ensuring supplier compliance and facilitating straight-through processing. Invoices are routed for approval and electronically signed off by relevant approvers in the remote locations. Rejected or queried invoices are rerouted via dedicated workflows for exception handling. The solution is fully integrated with the organization’s Microsoft Dynamics AX.

Results

With SoftCo Accounts Payable Automation, JJ Food Service now auto-match 80% of invoices and post them straight to the ERP system for payment, without the need for any manual intervention. Only exception invoices are routed for resolution, significantly reducing the workload for accounts payable teams. Auto-match of invoices to POs and GRNs along with approval and query management workflows have ensured that vendors are now paid much faster, ensuring excellent vendor relationships. Despite invoice volumes increasing, the capacity of the AP team has increased and the JJ Food Service AP team now have control and visibility over all invoices at every stage of the process.