Many business leaders invest in technology to help their companies grow and succeed. Others invest in technology to handle the growth and success that has already happened. That was the case with Steer Automotive Group.
The UK accident repair group experienced a tremendous amount of growth in a relatively short period of time. This made some of their back-office processes unsustainable and made them vulnerable to an unacceptable amount of human error and potential fraud.
Andrei Viscu is a financial integration specialist who helped lead the effort to implement better accounting tools and automated Steer’s accounts payable with Quadient AP by Beanworks.
The Challenge: Scalable Processes for a Growing Business
Andrei joined Steer Automotive Group to help improve processes for a rapidly growing business. Over the course of about 18 months, Steer went from having 11 sites in the same region to having nearly 60 sites across seven regions.
Steer had what Andrei referred to as an “old school” AP environment when he arrived – heavily paper-based, with a great deal of manual data entry and filing, and an approval workflow that relied on emailing, printing, and signing physical invoices.
Growth and expansion, paired with outdated manual accounts payable processes, created more complexity and increased the risk of fraud.
“In a situation like that, invoice fraud could be quite high,” said Andrei. “The approval workflow wasn’t consistent, so it would be easy to slide in an invoice that shouldn’t be processed into the big pile.”
Email-based fraud and phishing scams were also a growing concern given the amount of invoice approval done over email. While there had not been a specific event that triggered change, it was understood that rapidly expanding businesses are exposed to greater risk.
The goal was simple: create scalable processes that reduce risk and create greater efficiency.
Seeking The Right Solution
Based on their needs and budget, Andrei and the team at Steer constructed a list of five potential AP automation providers. It was in this process of exploration they met with Dominic Febers, Senior Account Executive at Quadient AP.
“Rather than starting with a sales focus, Dominic put together a file detailing Steer’s processes at the time and the flaws and vulnerabilities that could stop us from achieving our goals,” said Andrei.
The biggest immediate desire for Steer was to stop the overuse of email as a critical piece of the workflow and get the organisation as close to paperless as possible. Dominic explained how Quadient AP would facilitate that and ensure every invoice had an audit trail and that following on them is as easy as clicking a button.
In addition to the individual capabilities, it was also important the AP automation tool Steer chose would be able to integrate seamlessly with NetSuite, their recently implemented ERP. Those conditions and Dominic’s process assessment made Quadient AP the clear choice.
Implementation and Custom Workflows
The implementation and training on the new tool served as an extension of Dominic’s original consultation. Rather than focus solely on what Quadient AP could do, the team focused on Steer’s existing process and how they could be simplified and improved to help the organisation achieve their goals.
From there, the team began learning more about Quadient AP’s capabilities and exploring the software to evolve and improve different approval workflows. Steer received help from Quadient’s team to start designing custom workflows.
Once they got a good understanding of the software, they were easily able to adjust and make small changes over time.
The Outcome: Faster Processing, More Control, Better Visibility
With the help of Quadient AP, Steer continues to grow and open new branches in the UK. In doing so, they have scaled up accounts payable to process approximately 4,000 invoices per month, while decreasing the cost per invoice to less than £1.
Since automating, Steer has gone almost completely paperless. Everything is stored, reviewed, and approved within the system, which has eliminated any need for printing invoices and routing physical copies to be approved.
Additionally, automation has saved the finance team a great deal of time in the approval process and eliminated tedious, problematic tasks for members of the finance team.
“There’s not nearly as much manual input,” said Andrei. “The system automates a lot of the data from invoices, so you don’t need to have someone do that, which reduces the errors you see with more manual processes.”
Finally, Quadient AP has provided Steer the ability to delegate responsibilities. When all approvals sit with one person – as is the case in many organisations – it creates the potential for internal fraud with fewer checks and balances.
Regional leaders for Steer have started delegating certain invoice approvals to site leaders. This frees up strategic bandwidth for regional leaders who are no longer responsible for the approval of a higher volume of lower impact invoices.
Steer Automotive Group saw their overall success as an organisation outpace their back-office capabilities. With the help of Quadient AP automation, they now have scalable processes that can grow as fast as their business.
Request a demo to see how Quadient AP can do the same for your organisation.
