Advertising business Accord Group is generating annual savings of £150,000 through the automation of invoicing processes.

The group owns several advertising agencies and was struggling to process increasing amounts of order-related data, including 20,000 invoices per month under its previous bespoke set-up, as well as data extraction and validation which were completed manually.

These challenges prompted the rollout of off-the-shelf software to handle incoming purchase orders and invoices.

“Our original plan was to review the company’s financial package, but we quickly realised that we could achieve greater efficiency gains through the implementation of an automated document management system,” said Accord's IT application development director Andrew Constantinou.

“We were tasked with reducing the amount of paper that was physically being processed and stored in the business,” he said.

The company’s green strategy also played a role when choosing a new invoicing system, said Constantinou.

“By investigating the value of automating our inbound invoicing and billing, we could comply with this business aim while also driving the larger corporate strategy of reducing costs and reducing our carbon footprint,” he said.

As well as savings in manpower costs, the automation of the process also allowed an improvement of up to 30 days on turnaround times for processing invoices and purchase orders, which also improved reliability of payments to suppliers.

The software was provided by EMC.