Baker Ing, renowned for its expertise in receivables management for high-value and sensitive accounts, provides bespoke international debt collection, from ad hoc support to acting as an integrated service partner. Credit managers run searches on debtors and create a log of any possible reluctance for timely payment. Esker AI-driven Collections Management fits in perfectly with systems Baker Ing already have in place to enhance the offering to its customers.

The team will be referring Esker’s suite of Order-to-Cash solutions to include Collections Management, Cash Application, Credit Management, Invoice Delivery, Claims and Deductions, and E-payment solutions.   

To help businesses adapt swiftly, Baker Ing and Esker are launching a package designed to offer immediate countermeasures to inflationary pressures. This is the opportunity for companies to fortify their financial operations, ensuring they stay competitive in an inflation-ridden market.

Read full press release here.

Esker UK

Unlocking Positive-Sum Growth with AI-Driven Business Solutions for P2P & O2C Cycles

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Proservartner creates cost efficiencies, standardises and optimises processes and enables agile back-office functions to give clients the competitive advantage they need. The company has a long heritage in setting up shared service centres, and its experienced team will take companies through every step of its automation journey. Proservartner will be both a reseller and implement Esker Accounts Payable and Order-to-Cash solutions.

The team is receiving training on Esker’s solutions and will be fully up to speed to execute the automation journey of its customers soon.

Read full press release here.

Esker UK

Unlocking Positive-Sum Growth with AI-Driven Business Solutions for P2P & O2C Cycles

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As the global economic turmoil continues to challenge even the most positive of people within the Accounts Payable (AP) department, the ever-increasing difficulties of feeling totally overworked has already seen many people ‘burnout’.

As the work pressures continue to build within AP (increased workload under the same working conditions and practices) there now seems to be a new concern with those working on monotonous, repetitive and labour intensive AP tasks which have to be completed over and over again throughout the day. Those working on these types of boring manual processes are now known to be suffering from work ‘boreout’.

So what does this mean for those workers suffering from ‘boreout’ and what are the effects upon the AP department and the company as a whole?

Well, according to the Udemy Workplace Boredom Study¹, those bored at work are causing decreased productivity rates for an organisation, leading to higher costs, fewer growth opportunities and having a negative impact on company culture.

How can you spot if your AP Team are bored and stopping your company from being as productive as possible?

There are four key areas:

1. Manual Data entry

The majority of tasks performed by the AP department is repetitive, such as manually entering data and invoice verification. This means more opportunities for mistakes to be made and even greater errors due to peak periods such as month-end closing.

2. Invoice Approvals

When manual AP processes involve the same task to approve invoices then this quite often leads to lost invoices or delays in approvals. This can then lead to disagreements with suppliers which can further induce yet more stress to an already overworked department.

3. Matching Process

Incoming invoices need to be matched with the corresponding POs and goods receipts. However, this process quite often involves multiple different departments taking a long time to complete. Should the sales increase, then the volume of work will too. This leads to possible new team members having to be taken on and trained by existing members, who are already exhausted by trying to manage their own monotonous workloads.

4. Performance Indicators

The number of invoices that contain PO references, reception methods, or other KPIs like Days Payable Outstanding (DPO) remain obscured when undertaken by tedious manual, paper-based processes. The repercussions of this means depriving staff from understanding their own performance, and thus not being able to identify in what ways they can improve their personal development, in achieving a better performance. Also not knowing the performance of the business as a whole, can cause problematic repercussions.

So what can be done?

Well, quite simply, these boring, repetitive and manually intensive paper-based processes can be automated.

Automating the many AP processes within an organisation can bring the real focus back to what leads to the success of the business – its employees!

Automation shouldn’t be seen as a way to replace workers completing monotonous tasks, but rather a way to enable them to spend more time on helping those that are most important to the business surviving and thriving – its customers!

So how can automation help?

1. Eliminates the boring AP tasks

AP automation speeds up the AP process and reduces the errors of some of the most common of AP tasks. This leads to AP staff becoming free from the mundane tasks that cause ‘boreout’ and have more opportunities for internal skills to be enhanced and to make advances in their careers.

2. Using analytics to empower your team

With intelligent dashboards, real-time KPIs can allow AP teams to produce their own metrics with customisable reports. This can enable a more strategic view of tasks and actions required to further empower them in their daily activities.

3. Nurture collaboration

Online supplier portals and mobile apps let AP staff converse more easily internally (with colleagues) and externally (with suppliers), freeing up time for higher value tasks within the AP department.

So, although the AP processes can be fraught with tasks that are tedious and time consuming, leading to boredom and feeling underwhelmed within their roles, automation can be the key to giving them the opportunity to rectify this, quickly and easily.

From eliminating boring tasks, understanding key metrics more clearly and being able to concentrate on more value-added tasks, AP teams can feel a greater sense of achievement, empowerment and satisfaction.

You can read more in our eBook: Beating AP Boreout: How to re-engage your team with automation

¹ 2016 Udemy Workplace Boredom Study, Battling Boredom Blues: How to Engage Today’s Workers. Udemy for Business (2016).

Sam Townsend

Sam is Head of Marketing for Esker Northern Europe and has been part of the Esker family since 2003.

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Happy Customers and Employees

Companies, now more than ever, must focus on their most valuable assets: their employees. Automation is often thought of as something that “replaces” workers, when in reality, it can be used to:

• Eliminate manual tasks
• Empower your team with analytics
• Nurture collaboration with digital tools

Furthermore, expectations of excellent customer service are now the norm. They can be the make-or-break factor that determines whether a company thrives or dives. Speed, personal connection and digital competency are no longer hoped for when making purchasing decisions, they’re quite simply expected.

Givaudan, a worldwide provider of flavouring, scent, and health and beauty products, looking for ways to apply automation to various manual aspects of business operations while allowing for scalability and utilisation of their valued human resources.

Givaudan realised to scale up their business they needed to implement the following

• Create more strategic, fulfilling work for staff
• Reduce manual scanning & redundant data entry by automating manual tasks
• Eliminate human errors & inefficiencies with automated processing
• Improve customer satisfaction

Marton Nagy, Global Solution Expert Procure-to-Pay at Givaudan said, “Our goal for automation is not to make our people redundant, but to make them more valuable. We need our employees to be creative, to think, to make sure we go further than where we are today. Automating the tedious, repetitive tasks lets them use their time for more valuable purposes.”

The Solution

Just as in their business, specialising in complimentary scents to produce the best fragrances, they needed a complimentary solution to their already installed Esker Order Management solution. They chose Esker’s Accounts Payable (AP) solution to realise their vision.
Esker’s AP solution was implemented to eliminate the manual scanning and digitising of invoices, as well as capturing and recording payments, thereby increasing both speed and accuracy. It was implemented quickly thanks to Esker’s use of Agile methodology, and seamlessly integrated with Givaudan’s single instance global SAP system.

“We selected Esker’s Accounts Payable solution because of the trusted working relationship Esker had with the demand-to-cash team,” said Marton Nagy, Global Solution Expert Procure-to-Pay at Givaudan. “Esker has been delivering on its promise ever since.”

Part of Givaudan’s strategy for automating order entry and AP included making interaction with the solution simple for both customers and vendors. B2B customers place orders and send invoices in a variety of ways. With Esker, Givaudan has a flexible order processing solution that can adapt to the different ways B2B companies communicate without requiring complex integrations to accommodate Givaudan’s internal systems and data formats. Alessandra Mello, Global Head of Customer Care and Demand Planning at Givaudan, said, “We considered using EDI connections, but we found this quite limiting, as few customers are willing to invest the time, money, and resources to implement it,” said Mello. “Esker solutions don’t require our customers to build complex integrations to send us orders or invoices.”

Givaudan can now teach the solution (using Eskers Artificial Intelligence) the invoice formats its vendors use, allowing it to automatically and accurately enter invoices into the system. It also eliminates tedious entry of additional data to meet the invoice processing and tracking requirements in different countries — critical for a global company like Givaudan.
As a result, the AP staff has more time to concentrate on issues that truly require its skill and talent to investigate and resolve.

Vincent Depuis, IT Project Manager at Givaudan, said, “Our Esker journey started with automating sales order entry, and we’re seeing similar efficiency gains with the new AP solution. Our people can now focus their talents on what they do best, instead of tedious manual processes. Givaudan’s 2025 vision will feature even more ways to automate repetitive, manual tasks to add even greater value. Esker solutions will figure prominently in that plan.”

If you would like to learn more about Esker’s Accounts Payable solution, please get in touch, and I’d be happy to provide you with further information or a demo.

Susan Fletcher

Susan is an Internal Sales Consultant for Esker UK. She has been part of the Esker family since 2022.

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Esker, a global cloud platform and leader in AI-driven process automation solutions for finance and customer service functions, today announced that Arco, the UK’s leading safety company, has automated its accounts payable and procurement processes with Esker’s full Procure-to-Pay suite.

Arco was originally looking at only an accounts payable solution to gain greater visibility and control over their vendor invoice process. However, the finance, procurement and IT transformation teams also saw the advantages of automating their purchase order process, particularly with the management of their purchase orders for ‘goods not for resale’.

Due to recent growth, Arco had outgrown its current systems and processes. The ability of Esker to allow Arco to control spend and audit trails was a crucial reason for taking on these new solutions, as well as being able to tailor the solutions to its individual needs. 

Esker was approached in the first instance due to its positioning in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant for Procure-to-Pay Suites. Arco liked Esker’s flexible approach as well as its supplier enquiries management option which classifies non-invoices such as statements and supplier queries.

Amanda Henderson, Accounts Payable Manager at Arco, said, “We have already seen some great results since we went live with Esker in the summer. 71 out of the 88 vendors targeted are now automatically processed, with some 14,300 invoices actioned with no intervention whatsoever.”

This all-encompassing suite of solutions means that Esker will help transform Arco’s accounts visibility and control. Esker’s solutions will remove all manual touch points and reduce maverick spend, meaning staff can concentrate on more value-added tasks, such as enhancing customer relationships.

Read full press release.

Esker UK

Unlocking Positive-Sum Growth with AI-Driven Business Solutions for P2P & O2C Cycles

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I’m a big believer in numbers; there’s no doubt that they get us a long way in life. I’m lucky to have a good head for them; two of my family members studied Maths at Cambridge and I opted for Economics at Sheffield.

With my 4-year old, perhaps numbers can perhaps be over used – do I really know how many windows are on his friend’s house that we walk past on the way to school EVERY day? In some areas, however, they’re very much underutilised, and in the current economic climate we need to keep count of the things that matter.

Today, I’m looking at this from the perspective of the Accounts Payable (AP) department. If you don’t measure it, you can’t track it, and you certainly can’t improve on it. Businesses are impacted as much as households by tumultuous economic times, and it really is true that every penny counts.

From a business perspective, what we’re really talking about here is KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). These precious numbers denote how well (or badly) departments are performing, drive decisions and optimise efficiency, benefiting that all-important bottom line.

However, tracking KPIs often seems easier said than done. If business leaders and decision makers don’t know what they need to track, or how to track performance with the right tools, they’ll certainly struggle to make the right choices to transform their Accounts Payable department.

The first issue comes in where to start. There are an infinite number of KPIs and metrics available to an AP department, and certainly not all of them matter! With that in mind, here are Esker’s thoughts on the 10 metrics that really matter to Accounts Payable teams, why they count, and how automation can help steer the numbers in the right direction. Figures throughout are quoted from Ardent Partners epayables business research and Esker’s own automation results.

1) Cost to process a single invoice
Incorporating staffing, IT, processing and routing costs, ultimately the backbone of the AP department is processing invoices. With non-automated costs averaging £10.95, a mature level of automation can bring this down by over 75%, to an average of £2.25. For businesses processing thousands of invoices a year, there’s no questioning the sum total savings this can bring to the bottom line.

2) Time to process a single invoice
Time is most definitely money in business, and these are two numbers that quickly add up. There are early payment discounts to be had for best-in-class AP departments, and conversely, late fees for those falling behind par. A co-ordinated end-to-end automation solution can eliminate manual, time-consuming tasks associated with invoice processing, reducing average processing time from 11.9 days on average to 3.3 days on average.

3) Invoices processed per day per FTE (full time equivalent)
Staff productivity is a metric used across many business departments, and in AP it certainly shows its worth. Calculating the average daily output of an AP staff member can identify bottlenecks and pinpoint inefficiencies in invoice processing. Here, automation can boost the numbers by 50% or more – Parts Town saw their invoices per day per user jump from 57 to 92 by implementing the right technology.

4) Invoices linked to a PO
Here it’s matching the numbers that matters. Invoices linked to a correct purchase order number (PO) can be processed more quickly and efficiently. The market average for matched invoices runs around 44%, however ‘best-in-class’ automated businesses see this average over 80%.

5) Invoice exception rate
Exceptions can really take up time in invoice processing. Which, if you remember back to #2, directly impacts business costs by causing the delays. Most common exceptions are caused by missing or incorrect PO numbers and data and approval bottlenecks. With an automation employing 3-way matching technology, issues are handled quickly and effectively and can reduce exception rates by over 60%.

6) Touchless invoice processing
‘Straight-through’ or touchless invoice processing can literally count the clicks an AP specialist needs to make: zero. In the case of Feu Vert, AP automation allows processing of a staggering 9 out of 10 invoices without human intervention. Just imagine what you could with that time saving!

7) Volume of electronic supplier invoices
The Covid-19 pandemic had few lasting positive impacts on the world. However, a marked shift to home-working and in turn e-invoicing can be counted among them. Businesses can not only make themselves more receptive to electronic invoices, by providing the right technology, but can also encourage and onboard suppliers to really boost this metric. Sunway are a shining example of how well this can work – with a dedicated supplier portal they now receive 50% of invoices electronically.

8) Early payment discounts captured
As alluded to in #2, early payment discounts can make crucial savings much-needed for businesses. A streamlined AP process is vital for this; not only speeding up invoice approvals and payments, but also logging, tracking and flagging those critical payment due dates.

9) On time payments
The business world has always been a tough landscape, but with strained supply chains in many industries, now more than ever vendors rely on on-time and accurate payments. With real-time visibility, AP automation facilitates the possibility of 100% of payments made on time. Supported supplier relationships, a healthy cash flow and faster cycle times can help to bring about positive sum growth for all in the supply chain.

10) Days payable outstanding (DPO)
Anyone who’s been near a finance department is no stranger to DPO, essentially an efficiency measure on how quickly suppliers are paid given their payment terms. It goes without saying that suppliers want this figure to be as low as possible, but from an AP perspective having a consistent DPO benefits overall business cashflow and can demonstrate the overall strategic value of an AP department.

The sum of all these metrics? Automating AP processes can have a massive impact on the KPIs that matter. An efficient, unified approach brings invoices directly into a cloud-based solution, automatically.
A cloud-based solution such as Esker manages and analyses invoice data, automatically queuing received requisitions and tracking the important details mentioned above – PO numbers, due dates, early payment discounts, and so on.

And still – the best is yet to come. Customisable dashboards display live analytics and can track any KPI you can imagine – no calculator needed! Take a look at how Routeco optimised their AP process, automating 100% of invoice processing and re-routing 50% of AP staff time to higher tasks.

Want to learn more about how Esker can help you add up to AP success? Find out more about our AP automation solutions or contact us for more information.

Jennifer Ball

As Marketing Co-ordinator for Esker UK, Jennifer manages Esker UK's marketing campaigns and events for S2P solutions. She has been part of the Esker family since 2019.

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Esker’s Accounts Payable automation solution initially went live in France and the Netherlands, and will be implemented in additional subsidiaries by 2022 (Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Portugal, UK and Spain). After only a few months of solution use, the first objective has been met: Manutan has increased the percentage of invoices received via email from 30% to 80% and optimized the processing chain from invoice reception to payment.

Read full press release here.

Esker UK

Unlocking Positive-Sum Growth with AI-Driven Business Solutions for P2P & O2C Cycles

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IMI Precision Engineering required a cloud solution that offered a software as a service (SaaS) model. Not only would a SaaS solution allow for AP workflow outside their multiple ERP instances of JD Edwards, it would help stop unnecessary capital expenditure and IT complexity as there would be no additional software, hardware or maintenance associated with the implementation. After considering all available solutions within the marketplace, Esker was chosen as the best fit for the requirements of IMI Precision Engineering.    

Read full press release here.

Esker UK

Unlocking Positive-Sum Growth with AI-Driven Business Solutions for P2P & O2C Cycles

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Several keynote speakers are confirmed this year including world renowned AP expert Mary Schaeffer and the UK’s No.1 motivational business speaker Brad Burton. There will also be a number of presentations and panel discussions and a series of Industry leading speakers during the day.

Esker will be exhibiting and showcasing their cloud-based, AI-powered platform that spans the entire P2P process, to enable finance departments to improve purchasing and vendor decisions through the gains made in speed, strategy, and support.

Read full press release here.

Esker UK

Unlocking Positive-Sum Growth with AI-Driven Business Solutions for P2P & O2C Cycles

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Prior to Esker, a team of 4 accounts payable staff were manually processing up to 35,000 invoices a year from 800 vendors. This resulted in a very challenging process that led to common issues such as: duplicate payments from data input errors, slow workflow approvals, limited control and visibility, poor supplier relationships.

Hillarys therefore researched the market to find a solution that could help eliminate many of these issues and make process improvements across their entire AP function. Specifically including the automation of data manually re-keyed, reduction in errors, and an electronic workflow approval process to reduce the burden on authorising signatories. A scalable, cloud-based solution was essential as invoice numbers were predicted to nearly double over the coming years.

Read full press release here.

Esker UK

Unlocking Positive-Sum Growth with AI-Driven Business Solutions for P2P & O2C Cycles

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