Lincoln College has significantly streamlined its purchase-to-pay processes with Version One’s DbArchive. This document imaging technology, which is tightly integrated into Lincoln College’s Symmetry Financials accounting system, has reduced invoice approval times, freed-up document storage space and eliminated document archiving costs. It is also supporting Lincoln College’s environmental agenda. The Version One system can be accessed by up to 70 authorised Lincoln College staff across three different sites by drilling down through Symmetry.
Paul Allison, Finance Manager from Lincoln College, says, “With 60 cost centres and eight different sites, obtaining invoice approvals used to be extremely time-consuming and involved one person placing a stamp on the invoice and another physically signing it off. After merging with Newark College which is situated 20 miles away, we experienced further invoice approval delays due to invoices going missing in the internal post. We also used to incur substantial costs through printing, photocopying and posting documents back-and-forth between the different sites.”
With DbArchive, purchase invoices are scanned in, imaged and then automatically linked to the appropriate record in Symmetry. Authorised staff can now retrieve all invoices directly from their PCs instead of having to spend time manually locating documents. Using Symmetry’s integrated workflow functionality, invoice approvers are automatically emailed with a link to the invoice enabling them to approve, reject or query it on-screen with just a click of the mouse. This replaces manual and time-consuming approval processes involving posting and physically signing paper invoices.
Allison continues, “Version One’s software is very reliable and easy to use. As well as eliminating lost and misfiled invoices, DbArchive has transformed our purchase-to-pay cycle by reducing the time it takes to approve an invoice by four days, helping to avoid late payment charges. Version One’s software has also freed-up document storage space and has saved us thousands of pounds as we no longer have to pay a third party supplier to scan and archive our documents. In addition, staff are now free to concentrate on more value-adding activities instead of time-consuming manual procedures.”
Version One’s document imaging system is also supporting Lincoln College’s green agenda inline with Government targets.
Allison says, “Colleges are under increasing pressure from the Government to cut carbon emissions and make significant efficiency savings and so this was an important consideration when choosing Version One. Since implementing DbArchive, staff no longer have to print out and photocopy invoices several times over which has dramatically reduced our environmental impact.”
To further improve organisation-wide efficiency, Lincoln College is considering implementing Version One’s automated invoice processing system, DbCapture, to streamline and speed-up the capture of purchase invoice information. This system uses optical character recognition (OCR) technology to automatically capture purchase invoice data, reducing manual data entry by up to 80%.
