Private U.S. University automates invoice processing with Rocket® Content Services (Mobius)
Accounts Payable department streamlines invoicing to reduce costs
Industry
Education
Challenge
One of the United States’ top 10 private Universities faced considerable challenges with its Accounts Payable (AP) Department. It was tasked with serving not only the core University, but also its sizable health system, including the School of Medicine, School of Nursing and three hospitals. Each month, the University generated 80,000 invoices—40 percent paper and 60 percent electronic data interchanges (EDIs). The AP Department had to process all paper invoices manually. This required keying them into the University’s SAP system, searching through file cabinets with hundreds of thousands of invoices and then scanning and burning them onto CDs for long-term retention. Completing invoices took 10-14 days. With nearly one million invoices to process each year, the AP Department had to hire additional staff and still worked overtime and on weekends. In addition, the University had an extensive sponsored research program, which meant its grants, contracts and invoicing were subject to stringent federal compliance rules.
Results
By implementing Rocket® Content Services, the University was able to transition its AP activity from keeping the lights on to delivering real value to the school and its health system. Automating processes enabled the AP Department to reduce staffing by 25 percent. As a result, the school reallocated its resources to support the University’s mission of education, research and patient care.
- Automation: Reduced invoice backlog from 10-12 days to 1-2 days by automating processes for extracting critical data and resolving invoice issues.
- Digital Access: Scanned and made all paper invoices available to internal clients within 24 hours of receipt.
- Compliance: Reduced time-consuming audit requests by providing direct access to key data, which can be downloaded and emailed to auditors.
Want to learn more?
Rocket® Content Services is very easy to use. After we went live, my team reduced our 10- to 12-day invoice backlog to one to two days. Better yet, almost overnight we went from a data processing environment to an analytical environment. Our users made the transition beautifully. Complete visibility into the process has enabled us to become far more efficient.