Northavon Group is recognised as a trusted major solutions provider in Developer Services, Water Engineering, Mechanical & Electrical Engineering and Building Services.
The Somerset based business regularly partners with Regional Water Companies, Residential; Housing Developers, and major organisations such as the MOD and NHS across the entirety of the UK.
The Challenge
As a rapidly growing business, their existing method of manually processing supplier materials invoices was beginning to have a significant impact on their resources.
With a monthly average of around 3000 invoices continuing to grow, the process of manually opening and matching invoices to POs was rapidly becoming unmanageable.
Their need to refine and streamline this process was becoming more and more apparent, as regular monthly deadlines for processing invoices were becoming increasingly challenging to meet.
Accounts Manager Tracey Salisbury commented, “We would usually aim to have the previous month’s invoices processed by the 15th of the month, and with monthly volumes growing to over 3000 this was becoming increasingly difficult.”
Tracy added, “Each incoming supplier invoice would have to be opened and manually matched to a PO in Construct, which was becoming a full-time activity. One of my objectives when I began in my role was to introduce some form of automation to handle this, and to hopefully ease the huge burden it was having on our resources.”
As an existing user of both Eque2 Construct for Sage 50, and Eque2 Invoice Capture software, Northavon Group decided in February 2022 to adopt Eque2 Invoice Recognition software to provide the full end-to-end automation they were looking for.
The Solution
Delivered in conjunction with long-standing Eque2 partner Draycir, Eque2 Invoice Capture works with any invoice format without the requirement for template-based learning. It can open email attachments and read supplier invoices, automatically matching them to the corresponding POs in Construct. It then utilises digital storage to provide immediate access to invoices whenever needed.
In addition to these time saving features, it also brought the team at Northavon Group the added benefit of reducing errors and the subsequent time normally spent correcting nominal data errors, whilst reducing the need to reject and re-process invoices.
Tracey commented, “It handles the entire end-to-end process for us now, and as there are only a small number of invoices that cannot be processed automatically it has saved us a huge amount of time.”
Business Impact
The time-saving efficiencies that Invoice Recognition has brought to Northavon Group’s invoice and PO process has been significant.
Tracy commented “I’d say that Invoice Recognition has probably produced between an 80-90% improvement in timesaving efficiency since we started using it.”
Tracy added, “We can now hit our monthly deadline targets regardless of how busy we are, or the number of invoices we receive. I’d be happy to recommend Eque2 invoice recognition to anyone as it’s had such a big impact on our workload.”
