How a Veterinary Health Organization Streamlined Invoice Processing

A veterinary health organization that provides advanced medical care for pets through 24-hour emergency and specialty hospitals as well as urgent care clinics was struggling with an outdated accounts payable (AP) process. The growing organization was manually processing, approving, and posting supplier invoices. This approach was overwhelming its back-office staff and frustrating its valued suppliers.

So, it automated its invoice processing with a solution that digitizes and simplifies invoice handling.

The Challenges of Manual Invoice Processing

Manually processing invoices used to be a tremendous burden for the veterinary health organization.

Despite working more than 70 hours per week, the organization’s team of five AP professionals couldn’t keep up with the 6,000 to 7,000 invoices it receives each month. The AP staff was wasting lots of time keying data, forwarding emails, chasing down approvals, and fixing errors and mistakes.

The number of hospitals that the veterinary health organization operates and its high staff turnover also made it difficult to ensure general ledger information was coded correctly.

Additionally, the team could never be sure that they received all the company’s outstanding invoices. Suppliers often sent invoices to one of the veterinary health organization’s hospitals or to its corporate office. Invoices that were not forwarded to its AP team in a timely manner were at risk of being paid late. In a few cases, utility providers threatened to discontinue service to one of the organization’s pet hospitals because of late payments.

And, on top of this, it was not uncommon for emails requesting approval of an invoice to go unread or go missing.

In 2018, the veterinary health organization decided that it needed to find a more efficient way to process supplier invoices.

After an evaluation of available AP automation solutions, the organization selected the one with a technology provider who said they could process all its supplier invoices from a single email box.

Unfortunately, a beta test of the system quickly revealed that the veterinary health organization’s AP staff would have to manually review each invoice in the queue to determine who was responsible for processing it. Like most AP departments, to ensure accountability, each member of the team is responsible for processing certain types of suppliers (e.g., utilities, landlords, etc.), suppliers whose names starts with certain letters (i.e., A-G), or suppliers whose identification numbers start with certain numbers. That’s a lot to consider when divvying up the invoices manually.

With this realization, the veterinary health organization was back to square one. That’s when it discovered MetaSource.

The Accounts Payable Automation Solution

MetaSource provided a solution that combines automated invoice data capture, invoice approval routing, and touch-free uploads of approved invoices to the veterinary health organization’s NetSuite ERP application. As part of the solution, MetaSource also automatically puts each supplier’s invoice into a particular queue based on the organization’s business rules.

The organization plans to migrate to an Oracle ERP in the future. When that migration is complete, the MetaSource invoice processing automation solution will upload approved invoices directly into Oracle.

After a six-month delay because of the pandemic, the veterinary health organization went live with the MetaSource accounts payable automation solution in October 2020.

Download the complete case study to learn about the benefits the veterinary health organization achieved with this invoice processing automation solution.