Issue

This client provides technologies and services to support multilingual communications. 

An important part of their accounting process is invoicing customers. 

The company had been creating manual invoices in Quickbooks Online. 

At times, completing this task could take internal staff up to 5 business days. 

The client recognized that the process was inefficient and there was an over reliance on manual entry that opened the process up to risk of human error.

The Client Tries to Address the Problem Internally

Understandably, clients often try to address problems that arise without any outside support.

In this case, the client attempted to manage this problem by having some portions of the invoicing process handled by internal data software, but only for single item invoices. Recurring invoices and those with multiple line items were still being run through the accounting software.

The client knew there was a more efficient way to solve this problem, so they reached out to the Finance and Accounting Outsourcing (FAO) team at PBMares.

The Ultimate Solution

The FAO team offered a solution that could address the inefficiency and risk exposure problems surrounding manual entry and quickly realized that these solutions had the potential to deliver not just one benefit — but two:

• Drive efficiency. The client’s internal accounting team would save time (5 days was reduced to 30 minutes) and focus their efforts on more important tasks that demand human touch.
• Enhance data analysis that can be used to grow the business. The solutions PBMares proposed had the potential to grow the client’s business since more customer details and activity could be entered and subsequently tracked to reveal insights about additional customer needs.

How We Did It: Step by Step

The client understood that a full engaged systems integration would be cost prohibitive for their budget. 

So we developed a solution that met their needs and their budget.

Step 1: First, our team created an anchor point for the client’s internal databases so they would “talk” with the accounting software. To do this, we added client ID numbers from the accounting system to the internal database.

Step 2: Once that data anchor was assigned, we could manipulate the data export from the client’s internal systems for data entry into the accounting software without any manual entry or manual manipulation.

The team now spends less than 30 minutes on the invoice creation process (down from 5 days).

Learn More

Learn more about outsourcing all or part of your accounting or finance function. Contact us today.