Imagine a single accounts department getting 20,000 invoice emails a month
and having to process them manually. That was the challenge facing facilities
management business Integral.
To support its business operations, Integral has 3,000 suppliers and subcontractors that invoice the business for the products and services they provide. Invoices, that can range from under £10 to several thousand, amount to around 250,000 every year. Invoice processing was increasingly complex and labour intensive. Invoices were pdf attachments to email which were sorted, manually, into many different folders for onward processing.
There were problems and errors because not all emails had invoices, some had other documents and multiple invoices. A limited view of invoice type, measure of workload and a lack of auditing meant invoices were being lost. Some emails went straight to spam because suppliers sent multiple emails simultaneously.