Process Automation

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Government Contracting

Receiving a very high volume of invoices while being
under strict oversight of regulations & audits

R2 has been working with a client in the Government contracting space. The nature of the client’s business requires each contract to use outside vendors that clients engage with resulting in the client needing to review each vendor and contract to ensure that the invoices match the contract. However, only the project managers were familiar with each vendor’s contract, and thus needing to review each invoice individually along with other overseers of these invoices. As a result, the client was receiving a very high volume of invoices while being under strict oversight of regulations and audits.

Prior to a relationship with R2, the client was receiving all invoices to an inbox, where one person was delegated to forwarding every single email to the appropriate project manager to ensure the correct invoices were being submitted. IMAGINE? The project managers would then approve or reject the invoice. Following the approval, someone would have to manually print every single check, load them in an envelope, and mail them to each vendor. Talk about an antiquated process huh? The high volume of invoices required multiple accounts payable staff that were paid $60k+ to manually pay each invoice and involved very high staff turnover.

Missed invoices

Risks and Issues before our Solutions
were implemented

Client missed a lot of invoices getting lost in the inboxes and in between headquarters and the project managers. Once an invoice was sent to the PMs it was hard for the Accounts Payable staff to keep track and monitor for an invoice to get paid or keep project managers and themselves accountable. There was a lack of approval and workflow and no proper data retention system. No clear workflow and process on how invoices would get paid and as a result, wrong invoices would get paid/ invoices would have delays in Payment, penalties were accrued etc.

There was a tremendous lack of efficiency because of the physical check printing and no centralized system to have it all in one place. A physical person would have to be in the office just to create manual checks and as modern business goes Approvals, checks and payment dates would not be easily tracked this way which causes a lack of proper controls and increased risk of failure of system. With their old system the client would have had to shut down operations if they had no remote cloud system. Fraud – if an AP staff were to print checks and later remove them from the system no one would have known. Higher costs: Mailing costs, check cost, processing and payables staff, longer hours for PMs and headquarters.

Less paper. more time for your strategy.

Our Consulting solution: AP Automation/Digital Transformation, using Bill.com

We relocated the client’s accounts payable system onto a digital cloud which allowed vendors to send invoices all to one place where they could seamlessly be approved by multiple people and paid online. This maintained transparency while avoiding bottlenecks thus creating a clear workflow that drastically reduced the amount of missed invoices, time required, and money spent on accounts payable.

The centralized system made it so that invoices and checks were easy to follow. Reduced risk with the new accounting system as invoices were paid online and able to be traced. Reduced the necessary staff for accounts payable. Allowed for remote working, which was especially important in a COVID-19 world: Allowed invoices to be easily paid remotely, while still getting invoices approved by all project managers and other staff  did not have to print checks and manually mail them. Invoices were also able to be processed much faster with artificial intelligence and digital transformation making any invoice automatically set up to load to the cloud. Overall, the use of bill.com saved our client time and money, increased efficiency, and reduced risk.