Harcourt Education Case Study
Harcourt Education is the largest school book publisher in the UK and part of the Anglo-Dutch publishing enterprise, Reed Elsevier
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"We now feel more in control of invoice processing. The spin off benefits such as the invoice archive, management information and ease of use have definately helped to ensure buy in from our end users" |
Automatic processing of invoices reduces errors and puts an end to their repeated handling in paper form. BasWare’s Invoice Processing System has increased the efficiency of invoice processing procedures for UK company, Harcourt Education Limited.
Looking to the future.
These are the words that Tim Furber, Financial Controller for Harcourt in the UK, uses to describe the revolutionary changes brought to the processing of invoices implemented last year. BasWare’s Invoice Processing solution is only the first step towards complete automation of the publisher’s purchases, orders and in-voices, but benefits are already evident. “Getting invoice processing under control was of the utmost urgency for us”, says Furber.
Prior to automation, the company’s finance department had no real understanding of the level of incoming invoices before they actually arrived. Invoices could lie on people’s desks for weeks and then end up in the finance department just before holiday periods and public holidays, when staff took the time to action outstanding paperwork. Sometimes authorisation was granted by the wrong person and often the account codes marked on invoices were incorrect.
“The BasWare solution is now being used by 500 employees. A lot of small bills add up to considerable value.” Furber says. To demonstrate, Furber starts the BasWare application on his desktop and shows that on the day of the interview there are 1,800 invoices in the system totaling EUR 3.6 million (GBP 2.6 million). The number is only slightly higher than on a typical workday.
Harcourt Education
Harcourt Education is the largest school book publisher in the United Kingdom. The company is part of the Anglo-Dutch publishing enterprise, Reed Elsevier. “In addition to the UK,” Tim Furber says, “we sell books to Australia, New Zealand and to English schools throughout the world.”
A tool for management
“We handle 60,000 invoices a year,” he explains. “When we started to automate operations, we wanted first and foremost to increase control, enhance operational efficiency and minimise errors.”
Various permissions have been set up in the system sanctioning staff to approve in-voices. Hand written signatures on invoices to give approval are no longer required and also the system rejects incorrect accounting codes. In the past, a huge amount of finance’s time was spent checking and amending these codes.
A significant new change in practice is that invoices used to be sent directly to the buyer, now they go to the purchase ledger department, with the buyer’s name identified. The invoice is scanned into the system and after that the details about its progress are available to anyone who has the appropriate access rights.
“Above all, this is an information tool for management. We’re aware of incoming costs as soon as the invoice arrives. In addition, we’re able to supervise the use of money by individuals if need be. Since we know when the invoices have arrived, we can also chase people when it comes to approval,” Furber declares.
“With large invoices—such as those from printing houses—we can make certain that they’re paid on time, and so benefit from fast payment discounts. The system also ar-chives the invoices so that they can be found easily. When the invoices were only on paper, they ‘disappeared’ into the manual filing system, and it was very difficult to retrieve them when needed to resolve queries.”
Managing invoice authorisation
Harcourt began to consider increasing the effectiveness of invoice processing two and a half years ago. Tim Furber was the leader of the project.
“Although there were several workflow products and archiving solutions on the market, BasWare was the only solution which could offer all the components we wanted. In particular, authorisation of invoices was important to us, and as far as I know, no one else offered this at the time,” Furber says.
“A visit to one of the Nordic’s leading financial institutions, Okobank, who were using BasWare to handle 1 million invoices, across businesses in Finland, convinced us of BasWare’s suitability The solution can be expanded to respond to changing requirements, and choosing an off-the-shelf product is easier than building the application ourselves.”
Furber is grateful to BasWare’s staff for their patience and for their careful and de-tailed work. He says BasWare’s experience and project management disciplines pro-vided a substantial amount of detailed documentation about the solution and its implementation at Harcourt.
“During the process, BasWare worked closely with us. It was important for us that the project became a company one – not just finance’s. The change affected the vast majority of our personnel, since most of them are responsible, at least occasionally, for processing invoices. So, time also went into training and internal discussions.”
Looking to the future
Furber considers that the investment will pay for itself in eighteen months.
Also, Furber says the BasWare project has not yet ended. Having already implemented the Invoice Processing System, Harcourt is evaluating the benefits of electronic requisitioning with a view to rolling out BasWare’s Purchase Management System.
“Control will then start at the beginning of the process, since the system will manage what each person is permitted to order. At the same time, management will receive in-formation on incoming costs as soon as the purchases are made,” concludes Furber.
