The hidden opportunities in an Accounts Payable project

For freshly graduated Finance Consultants Arno and Mattias—Young Hubs at TriFinance—this was their first project. Arno: "I was given a lot of responsibility right away. After a few days of training at the client, I in turn trained Mattias, who was also brought in on this project shortly after me. So the challenge was to become familiar with the range of tasks and bring structure as quickly as possible. At the same time, due to the go-live of the new virtual Shared Services Center and new way of working, there were still a lot of uncertainties, both for the permanent employees and for us as consultants. A proactive approach was therefore important: finding out how billing flows were running and clearing up ambiguities where necessary, for example by coordinating with colleagues abroad."

Problem versus opportunity

Arno and Mattias did not let the sometimes chaotic circumstances distract them, but rather saw the opportunities.

"Rather than merely performing the operational tasks within Accounts Payable, this project offered the opportunity to immediately dive deeper into the processes and look for causes of the problems occurring. Due to changes in the software package, automatic booking of invoices was no longer possible, resulting in a multiplication of the number of invoices to be booked and approved manually. Pending the reintroduction of autoposting within the software, I took the initiative to have smaller invoices from the same supplier bundled together," Arno explains. This is a minor intervention, but it does make a difference. Instead of receiving 80 invoices per month from this supplier, it is now just 4 invoices per month, for the same invoiced amount. By applying this logic across all entities and for different suppliers, the workload has been significantly reduced.

Optimizing the flow for leasing invoices

Mattias, on his side, delved deeper into the invoicing of leasing cars when it became apparent that these invoices often remained outstanding for a long time, with a significant impact for both the supplier and various departments at his client. "Leasing cars is a complex matter due to the tax legislation associated with it. From the delivery of the invoicing data by our customer to the leasing company, over the preparation of the invoices at the leasing company to the processing of the invoices again at our customer's side, there was a huge amount of manual work. Each month, the accounts payable team had to re-type and book about 1,000 invoice lines manually for subsequent approval by the fleet manager. Although I had no experience in booking leasing invoices, I quickly felt that this could be done more efficiently," Mattias explains.

The solution was quite simple: instead of in PDF format, invoices from the leasing company now arrive in Excel. Thanks to the use of Power Query in Excel, the correct bookkeeping codes are automatically assigned and everything can be loaded correctly into the bookkeeping software. Due to Mattias' proactive approach, all stakeholders—fleet, leasing company, GL accountant and account payable—are profiting. The error rate is significantly reduced, invoices are paid faster and at least 8 hours of manual work per month are eliminated.

The added value of mentoring

"This is a realization I'm quite proud of as a starting Finance Consultant. Within this project we were given quite a bit of freedom, which gave us the opportunity to tackle things that actually add value. The mentoring by TriFinance is crucial in this. Through regular status meetings with the internal BaseCamp team, these optimization opportunities quickly surface and as a consultant you get the necessary support to see them through. For example, I took training on Power Query and was able to tune in with an experienced mentor." And that is precisely what TriFinance stands for: offering creative solutions to explicit and implicit customer challenges from a shared knowledge base.

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