How will you tame the red tape as the number of your orders and invoices increases?

Each growing company will one day reach its „breaking point“ when it can no longer keep up with the administration or routine tasks connected to order and document processing, all of which may end up costing it tens or hundreds of Czech crowns per month. A lot of companies only start to deal with the issue once it arises, which tends to be too late. Read the stories of companies that have gone through this in order to avoid making the same mistakes.

You are employing people who only process invoices and other documents

If your invoice clerk or accountant spends most of his or her working hours scanning and approving invoices or rewriting information from documents into your company system, you are wasting your money on routine work with limited added value. In addition, as your company grows, this problem will only keep getting worse.

For instance, in the company INPAP PLUS, which sells packaging materials and office and hygiene supplies, the accountant has to print out every single received invoice, get it approved and then manually rewrite it into the accounting software. After launching the iNVOiCE FLOW extraction software, the complexity of processing each invoice has been halved, saving the company 30,000 CZK in the first couple of months.

The numbers look significantly different for MALL.CZ, which exchanges hundreds of thousands of documents with its suppliers (orders, delivery notes or invoices) per year. In the past, the company processed all of its documents manually, which cost the e-shop a fortune. For this reason, in 2014, MALL launched an EDI system and then in 2020 calculated that the total amount saved had exceeded 4 million crowns.

Approving orders or invoices takes too long

Invoices lie untouched for days on end, waiting for bosses‘ approval, and, after several reminders, you barely manage to pay them before their due dates. The situation with orders is similar and you run the risk of not having enough goods for either production or sale. These are typical problems of companies that are getting snowed under with documents which their employees cannot keep up with.

Parfumerie Douglas was dealing with a similar problem. When the company received an overdue invoice reminder, it was difficult to trace its status or the person in charge. Status checking and the communication pertaining to it was keeping almost 40 people busy, from shop managers, team leaders to admin or accounting staff.

Yet again, this problem can be solved by using exctraction software, which automatically receives invoices, sends them for approval and subsequently rewrites them into the information system. The accountant or invoice clerk mostly just keeps an eye on the process and intervenes only when absolutely necessary. Thanks to the electronic workflow, Parfumerie Douglas has also reduced its number of invoice-related questions to a tenth. And the number of the company‘s overdue invoices has decreased by 75 %.

Struggling with long new hire trainings and high rates of warehouse keepers‘ errors?

PEVI was dealing with the same exact problem. This company supplies work clothes and protective work gear, which often only differ from each other in mere details. On average, it took a newly hired warehouse keeper 6 months to learn to distinguish between the individual items on sale, which slowed them down and caused high rates of errors during the shipping process – customers would get different goods than the ones they had ordered.

After launching the warehouse management system WMS, the speed at which the goods were removed from stock has increased by 40 % and the error rate has dropped by 98 %. The system now automatically leads the warehouse keepers to the right item based on the order and makes it virtually impossible for them to make a mistake – even if, say, they don‘t even know what the goods look like. In the very first month of using WMS, the software saved PEVI over 100 hundreds of crowns.  

You don‘t have a clear overview of your stock

This is a common mistake if you are keeping track of your stock only on paper or in Excel. For example, an e-shop selling cosmetics and healthy foods would completely disregard the expiration dates when adding goods to, or removing them from, storage – they left everything to change or to the intuition of the warehouse keepers. Later on, when the company launched the WMS warehouse management system to combat its influx of orders, it turned out that a third of the items in stock had expired and had to be thrown away. This cost the company hundreds of thousands of crowns.

Another example: an e-shop selling metal goods. The company‘s selection consists of a large number of small items which need to be constantly kept track of. Sometimes, it turned out only after receiving an order that the goods in question weren‘t in stock. They had to be ordered again, which increased the delivery time. In Bonus Bona, company selling toothbrushes, sellers would even promise their customers that the product they were looking for was in stock – and, when preparing the shipment, they found out that it wasn‘t.

Bleak scenarios like these can be averted by introducing WMS. First, you integrate it into your accounting system and then you gain constant access to monitoring the status of your stock in real time, including its warehouse positions. You can also set your own strategies for adding or removing goods and select expiration date as one of the criteria. The system then makes sure that the goods with the closest expiration date leave the warehouse first and that the warehouse keepers are led to them first when preparing orders for shipment.

You lack warehouse or admin staff

Maybe it isn‘t even necessary for you to look for new employees – thanks to the right software, the same number of people will get much more work done.

In the above-mentioned company Bonus Bona, the WMS warehouse management system now allows them to get the same amount of work done in 2 hours, compared to 12 hours in the past. Software company Morosystems has saved its invoice clerk 60 hours of work per month after introducing exctraction software.

You are expanding abroad

Abroad, it is common to exchange documents (especially orders, delivery notes and invoices) via EDI, an internationally accepted standard of electronic communication which automates a singnificant amount of routine work.

For example, online pharmacy Pilulka can no longer imagine life without EDI. „It isn‘t possible for us to keep hiring new people to take care of order, document and invoice processing whenever we expand abroad. Thanks to EDI, we can grow and increase our profits proportionally without needlessly increasing our admin costs,“ says Michal Hanáček, Pilulka‘s COO.

Are you approaching any of the above-mentioned breaking points and do you feel that you could benefit from extraction softare, EDI or WMS? Let us know and we will be happy to look at your situation.