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magazine
Over the past two years, TheWelbeck
Estates Company has saved time,
money and storage requirements as a
result of implementing Invu document
management software. The agricultural
business, which comprises three estates
in England and Scotland and an extensive
commercial and residential property
portfolio, turned to Invu in a bid to
reduce reliance upon paper and enable
the finance team to spend less time
on data generation and more time on
information analysis and interpretation.
The combination of effective
workflow and powerful search has
enabled TheWelbeck Estates Company
to reduce purchase-to-pay times by
up to 50% and cut document retrieval
times from up to ten minutes to just
seconds. The use of Invu has been
extended outside finance to provide
other departments, including property
management, with rapid access to
credit control information. In the future,
the company plans to build on this
foundation with the addition of new
document types, including leases.
Business Diversification
Over the last few years, TheWelbeck
Estates Company has embarked upon
significant and successful business
diversification. The traditional agricultural
business is based upon a 15,000
acre estate in Nottinghamshire and
Derbyshire, with additional estates
in Northumberland and Caithness in
Scotland. These businesses combine
farming with commercial and residential
property management and investment.
More recently, the company has begun
a complete redevelopment of 300,000
sq. ft. of buildings previously used by
the Army as an educational college. A
number of the buildings have already been
refurbished and now house offices and a
range of commercial and retail operations,
from the School of Artisan Food to a Farm
Shop and Café.
Ian Goodwin, Finance Director of
TheWelbeck Estates Company, explains:
“The heart of the business remains a very
traditional English estate, but the company
is developing and embracing other
businesses. This diversification has created
new demands and made it important to
gain an understanding of the performance
of the new business areas.”
One of the key steps in this process was
the decision to minimise reliance on paper-
based documentation. “Welbeck Estates
wanted to find a far more effective way of
both managing and finding information,”
Goodwin explains. “Driving paper from the
business would reduce storage costs and,
more importantly, release finance staff
from routine clerical work.”
Centralising Processes
To do this,Welbeck Estates opted to
implement a document management
system from Invu. “Invu offered two key
benefits,” says Goodwin. “Firstly, the
powerful search function enables users
to locate data very quickly. Secondly,
the integrated workflow enables the
company to transform the purchase-to-
pay process.”
Traditionally, suppliers had sent invoices
directly to individual departments at
Welbeck Estates and to its estates in
Northumberland and Caithness. Processing
up to 100,000 invoicing documents a year
through a manual, primarily paper-based
process, the company found it difficult
to track the progress of each invoice,
and risked duplicate invoices arriving in
the finance system and invoices being
misplaced during the approval process.
Welbeck Estates worked with Invu
to centralise invoice processing and
exploit the workflow functionality. All
invoices are now received centrally by the
finance department at Welbeck – either
by email or in hard copy. There, they are
Document management
Harvesting efficiency
HowWelbeck Estates has transformed its business performance
with the help of Invu document management software
immediately scanned and loaded into the
Invu workflow, which is directly integrated
with the finance system.
Integrated Model
Simon Thompson, Financial Accountant
at Welbeck Estates Company, explains:
“To realise the value of the investment
in document management, it is essential
to avoid re-keying invoice information
into the finance system. Using the Invu
workflow and integration to the finance
solution, there is no need to re-key.”
In addition to removing the errors that
are typically associated with re-keying,
Invu automatically checks invoices for
duplication, using supplier name, invoice
number and amount to minimise the
risk of duplicated invoices arriving in the
finance system.
The implementation has created a far
more robust invoice authorisation process:
each invoice is reviewed by three people
and it is no longer possible for paper
documents to be processed without the
correct authorisation. In addition, the
company now has complete visibility of
invoice status at any time. “In the past,
when invoices went direct to the office in
Caithness, for example, it was difficult to
respond to supplier queries or effectively
manage the process,” says Thompson.
“From a purchase ledger perspective, it is
now far easier to trace where invoices are
in the purchase-to-pay process.”
Realising Value
The centralised model has reduced the
purchase-to-pay process by 50%. As the
process now requires minimal manual
input,Welbeck Estates has been able to
redeploy the purchase ledger clerk to other
duties. It has also significantly reduced the
amount of space needed for paper storage
“The heart of
the business
remains
a very
traditional
English
estate...”
Continued...