Sweet digital AP process automation with NetSuite

The food is tasty at this popular fast food chain with 1,000 locations in North America, but its AP invoice processing operation had gone sour. Four full-time employees struggled to process 1,600+ invoices each month, which all had to be sorted and separated by location and then emailed for approval to a manager at the location. In some cases, an invoice would be emailed to 1,000 different possible approvers in the hopes that the right one would see and sign off on it. Then, invoices would be entered into NetSuite, where employees would manually add GL codes and cost center allocation. It was taking an average of 16 days to process one invoice, and storage of paper invoices for archive/audit purposes was eating up space at the corporate office.

Smart workflows from FormedAI were an appetizing solution. Invoices are now scanned to FormedAI’s system and automatically routed to the correct approver at every location, eliminating email chains and confusion. A direct integration with Oracle NetSuite automatically applies GL codes and cost center allocation based on predefined rules, reducing the need for manual human data entry and coding, and allowing employees to focus on exception handling. Digital invoice images are stored directly in NetSuite now, making it a true digital process from start to finish, saving paper and people. The corporate office has more visibility into location-specific spending with reports and dashboards that integrate NetSuite data.