Accounts Payable Department Clears $1.1M of Aged Payables and Realizes a 40% Reduction in Invoice Processing Time

Chain dedicated to custom storage solutions for the home, with an emphasis on quality materials and modern designs

$1.1M
In-year Profit Gain
40%
Reduction in Invoice Processing Time

Challenge

As a $500 million dollar business, this Home Manufacturer staffed a disproportionately large Accounts Payable department to overcome significant processing inefficiencies. Invoice processing was completely manual, and the team was struggling to maintain 3 separate ERP systems. As a result, the department often failed to pay invoices in a timely manner, had critical data accuracy issues, and poor morale led to high staff turnover.

Our Approach

Partnering with the department manager and staff, we completed a comprehensive current state assessment to determine the root causes of these issues. Our analysis uncovered several improvement opportunities:

  • Standardize, document, and retrain the process to minimize variation in acceptable standards for processing and accuracy
  • Establish performance visibility and management to measure success and hold staff and other stakeholders accountable. Using data from ERP systems, create a Key Performance Indicator Dashboard to visualize performance data in real-time
  • Review Aging Reports and validate accuracy of aged payables to clear erroneous or duplicate transactions

To capitalize on these opportunities for improvement, we tested, piloted, and implemented these solutions with over 30 employees across the Shared Services organization.

Value Created

As a direct result of this initiative, our client realized significant performance improvements within 3 months of our engagement:

  • Aged Payables over 90 days was reduced from $1.2M to $0.1M by eliminating erroneous and duplicate transactions, leading to an in-year profit pickup of $1.1M
  • Invoice Processing Time was reduced 40%, from an average of 12.6 days to less than 8 days, enabling early payment discounts with vendors totaling $200K in annual cost savings
Business Management Consulting Services at The Poirier Group

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