Making accounts payable smarter
Streamline your A/P system with automated delivery, management, approval, and routing of purchase orders, invoices, and related documents.
What’s your advantage?
Reduce processing costs, decrease manual effort, increase accuracy, improve timeliness, eliminate lost items, and reduce storage space for source documents. Automation improves cash management, captures discounts, avoids late fees, and detects duplicate bills and overpayments.
- Scan all A/P invoices into Feith Document Database
- Post Invoices to your critical (“line of business” or LOB) system
- Convert EDI Invoices to images and store them
- Manage Use Tax audits and reviews
Quicker invoice processing decreases the number of late payments and associated penalties. Also, this improvement reduces calls, questions, and hassles from vendors, increasing ROI and controlling your budget.
Benefits of Agile AP
- Improve customer service
- Reduce processing costs
- Decrease manual effort
- Increase accuracy
- Improve timeliness
- Eliminate misplaced paper
- Increase productivity
- Improve approval processing
- Capture discounts
- Eliminate late fees
- Detect duplicates
- Enhanced electronic audit trails
Properly automating your AP Process can shave more than 80% off of your processing costs per invoice.
Invoicing and Workflow: Transforming Process Automation into Operational Cost Control.
A/P self-service
Whether its invoice submissions from vendors or check requests from inside your organization, a critical component of making Accounts Payable quicker, more efficient, and more accurate is adopting web-based self-service automation. The fewer hands and eyes that touch your payables requests, the more streamlined the process becomes.
Internal check requests
The same Agile AP Self-Service functionality is also designed for your employees to request and track payment as well, for purchase reimbursement, travel & expense, charitable donation, payroll advance, and more. Your internal self-service payment portal requests can be managed by the employee, eliminating the need for hand-holding submission requests and ‘sneaker-net’ “where’s my check?” inquiries.
Vendor self-service
The Feith Vendor Self-Service portal allows payees to self-service their account through a secure website. This provides vendors with access to the specific PO and non-PO billing and payment information related to their transactions, including:
- Payment terms and information
- Status of invoices
- Vendor and account information
- Purchase orders
- Access to past payment details
- Web invoice submission
What’s in it for you
The Agile AP Self-Service platform is built on the back of two of Feith’s most popular products, Forms iQ and Workflow iQ, as well as 30 years of Feith A/P application know-how. Adding a self-service component to your accounts payable process will reduce A/P process costs, increase A/P productivity, lower invoice capture and entry costs, reduce time and costs associated with updating vendor information and disputes.
50% of organizations report a payback period of nine months or fewer, with AP automation.
Time & expense, travel & entertainment
Whether your organization calls it Time & Expense, Travel & Entertainment, or some combination thereof, properly administering T&E to guarantee that reimbursements are generated accurately and in a timely manner is a process that can often slow down your efficiency and result in overpayments, underpayments, and headaches.
Agile AP can seamlessly integrate and automate T&E, making the employee payables process more efficient and cost effective. Not only can automation cut T&E processing time in half, it fosters stronger internal controls, prevents employee abuse of your policy, and helps you avoid Sarbanes-Oxley compliance issues.
How Feith works to optimize T&E reporting and management:
- Automates the entire T&E process, including exception notification
- Simple web forms for T&E submission
- Document Database to store all files related to T&E for simple retrieval
- DoD-certified security and Sarbanes-Oxley compliance
What’s in it for you
A vital task within accounts payable, and often within human resources, T&E automation is a underrated goal that not only improves efficiency and precision within HR and A/P departments, but will show overall improvement and speed to organization-wide workflows.
- Save time and effort by implementing rapid adoption systems for T&E
- Extend the life of critical software, meeting user demands cheaply
- Score quick wins at user pain points with on-fly solutions
- Simplify form submission, resulting in accurate information
- Automate document life-cycle across the organization
- Accommodate organizational change with minimal IT resources
- Create a common centralized user-and-database interface
We understand the importance of increasing and enhancing your process flexibility and managing your workflows with uncomplicated customization and automation. These cutting-edge solutions are seamlessly integrated to make T&E more simple and functional than ever, letting you concentrate on other vital activities.
Customer success stories
Industry: Construction
Application:Accounts Payable (with JD Edwards)
Location: Horsham, Pennsylvania
The Problem:
Toll Brothers, the nation’s leading builder of luxury homes, is located in Horsham, Pennsylvania and is less than fifteen minutes from Feith headquarters. Toll Brothers needed help managing a large number of paper invoices, which were not tied to their accounting system at the time. Paper and digital invoices needed to be linked.
The Solution:
The company implemented Feith solutions at 11 divisions nationwide and at its headquarters in Pennsylvania.Feith solutions make it possible for more than 18,000 invoices (90,000) pages) to be scanned into FDD weekly. Feith’s Quick Integrator indexes those invoices to populate the FDD database fields directly from the Toll Brothers’ accounting system (JD Edwards). The user enters information into JD Edwards, then Quick Integrator links the JD Edwards invoice to FDD. Employees can search in JD Edwards using Quick Integrators “Show me the paper” functionality to view the invoice.
COLD also captures the print stream and then sends the check images to FDD, so checks are linked to the invoice as well. With Feith solutions, Toll Brothers can track the overall story from invoice to payment.
FDD has proven to be the easiest and best integration with our A/P J.D. Edwards software. As soon as FDD was implemented, we did a back file conversion of two years’ worth of invoices to clear out much needed space. With FDD, we’ve been able to improve our auditing process as well as save space and time. The FDD database has facilitated our research of records and vendor account reconciliation and enabled invoice records from across the country to be at our fingertips.
Industry: Utilities
Application: Accounts Payable (with PeopleSoft)
Location: King of Prussia, Pennsylvania
The Problem:
An amazing transformation has taken place at AmeriGas, the nation’s largest retail propane distributor. Headquartered in King of Prussia, PA, AmeriGas serves 1.3 million residential, commercial, industrial, agricultural, motor fuel, and wholesale customers from about 650 locations in 46 states. One of AmeriGas’ expense reduction strategies for 2004/2005 was to centralize its back office in the areas of cash applications, collections, and accounts payable. AmeriGas was all too aware that it was not going to be easy. The reality of what needed to be changed to bring AmeriGas into the 21st Century was a mammoth task.AmeriGas was still mired in first-generation A/P invoicing. They had mountains to climb to get to web-based A/P invoicing in order to reduce costs and stay competitive. With over 650 retail locations across the U.S., AmeriGas had a daily challenge processing invoices. Their retail sites had very limited technology – no computers or scanners. A/P invoices were coded in the field and forwarded by postal mail to King of Prussia. Invoice data was then manually entered into their PeopleSoft accounting system. Besides the costly task of sorting and physically filing thousands of paper invoices, there were delays in paying vendors that resulted in late fees. Everyone agreed that the process was very inefficient and needed to be streamlined.
The Decision:
AmeriGas was looking for better information management – tracking of data and invoices; workflow of documents; reduced time in retrieving copies; more information for field managers; quicker access to data for multiple PeopleSoft users; greater visibility for managers budgeting expenses; additional control for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.
Their two-year search for an imaging vendor resulted in the selection of Feith Systems. What made them select Feith? AmeriGas wanted a totally web-based solution that would be tightly integrated with their PeopleSoft accounting software. Thin was in, since there were so many sites that needed to participate in the process, installing and maintaining software at the remote sites would have added another expense layer. Other vendors could only provide solutions that required software installations on the desktop.
“We were looking for a single vendor solution that would address all of our needs,” said Pat Arrington, Manager, Disbursements at AmeriGas. “Feith had an integrated workflow solution, a strong audit trail, a quick integrator tool, and an extensive product line that was scalable and flexible. To top it all, it was all Feith’s software and we liked their hands-on approach to dealing with its customer. A refreshing touch.”
The Solution:
Feith and AmeriGas engineers collaborated to implement a completely web-based document imaging (WebFDD) integration with PeopleSoft. The result was a solution that is user-driven from PeopleSoft with integration via Feith’s WebFDD URL tools and managed by Feith Workflow iQ. “It was a really cool collaborative effort,” adds Arrington. “The integration was seamless.”
Invoice status is managed throughout with Feith’s Workflow iQ. AmeriGas chose Workflow iQ for its flexibility and ease of implementation. Invoices are now scanned and sorted via bar codes and fed directly into Feith Document Database (FDD) where they enter the Accounts Payable Workflow. An A/P analyst views the image of each invoice in WebFDD and sorts them based on document type. From that point on, A/P analysts work from within PeopleSoft where custom screens using the Feith WebFDD URL interface provide the “show me the paper” button functionality. This functionality enables the analysts to key into PeopleSoft directly from the invoice image. When the invoice information is saved in PeopleSoft, vital index information, such as the PeopleSoft voucher number and status codes for workflow routing, are saved in FDD.
A significant benefit for the managers in the field retail locations is that they can now quickly access documents initiated within PeopleSoft and review or challenge items scheduled to be paid. “This Web integration keeps our IT costs to a minimum,” says Arrington. “The self-service that WebFDD provides reduces phone calls to the A/P Department.”
As FDD is distributed to the retail locations, vendors will be required to send invoices directly to headquarters for processing. Simply cutting down on the cost of forwarding invoices from each location is a big part of the savings that they will realize.
Continuing Success:
One of the biggest returns on investment is increased productivity. AmeriGas is enjoying the benefits of a fully implemented Web invoicing A/P system – reduced processing costs, decreased manual effort, increased accuracy, improved timeliness, elimination of lost items and reduced storage space for source documents. In addition, FDD improves information distribution and approval processing, enhances electronic audit trails, and makes customer service much more efficient. Automation has improved AmeriGas’ cash management, including capturing of discounts, avoiding late fees, and the detection of duplicate bills and overpayments.
To say that AmeriGas is thrilled with the potential for saving tens of thousands of dollars annually, is putting it mildly. They’re simply ecstatic!
Industry: Health Care
Application: Accounts Payable (with Lawson)
Location: Kinston, North Carolina
The Problem
Hillco is a multidimensional conglomerate that owns the nation’s largest privately held chain of nursing homes as well as an insurance company for group health and auto coverage. With involvement in such paper-intensive industries, family-owned Hillco needed to find a way to stay organized, increase productivity and keep costs in check.The answer for Hillco was to implement a comprehensive document imaging system that would support the storage and retrieval of the company’s accounts payable records, invoices, checks and the like. In Hillco’s business, Federal, state, and local audits are standard and being able to produce any given form on demand is critical to smooth operations.
The Decision:
When Hillco decided to implement its imaging system, the company was running on a UNIX platform and needed a vendor that could work with this specification while still offering all of the sophisticated features of imaging technology. Feith presented the most attractive solution for Hillco’s imaging needs and did so with an unparalleled degree of personal attention. The chosen package was the Feith Document Database (FDD), a complete imaging, document management, COLD (Computer Output to Laser Disk), and workflow solution.
“I wanted someone who was going to listen to me and then come up with a solution that would work for me. I needed to develop custom applications, and insisted on working with a company which could develop specific APIs,” explained Bobby Jefferson, head of Corporate Development for Hillco. After searching several leading imaging vendors, Hillco selected Feith and has enjoyed a successful relationship thus far. “Feith’s competition was too limited. We looked at another company, but when we talked with Feith and told them, ‘we want to go here,’ they helped us do it.”
The Solution:
Before Feith, Hillco limited its imaging installation to only certain areas of the business, testing the system’s capabilities and exploring how the company might extend its use for the greatest benefit. Since then, they have been making “wholesale changes,” according to Jefferson, including a migration from UNIX to Windows NT. It currently requires two to three man-hours to run maintenance and other routine tasks, compared with eight to nine on the UNIX platform.
“Since we migrated to NT, the ease of management is considerably easier, the cost of ownership is lower, user understanding of the system is better, and the performance has increased,” Jefferson said.
On a typical day, Hillco creates 50,000kb of images. One of the most valuable features of the Feith Document Database is its web interface, WebFDD, which brings images into a PDF format for easy manipulation. Hillco staffers are comfortable with this system and can do searches by employee or content. FDD generates all of the associated pages and sends them right to the user’s desktop, where he or she can print it out or work with it in any way. “The man-hours we’re saving from not having to search manually for paper documents is incredible,” said Jefferson.
Also using WebFDD, Jefferson provides Hillco’s auditors with a log-on ID that grants them access to the company’s records. This spares Hillco staff from having to take the time to collect this information, which previously drew considerable resources away from other important work.
In the accounts receivable and payroll departments, Hillco is in the process of connecting its 54 Britthaven nursing homes, located in North Carolina, Virginia and Kentucky, to corporate headquarters via WebFDD. Currently, the company has to send reports from these departments to the accountants at its various sites by overnight delivery. Each report is composed of 500 double-sided pages. With the ease and convenience of FDD, these same reports will be shared electronically, saving Hillco the steep shipping charges associated with this task and allowing personnel quicker access to needed information. Moreover, to prevent unauthorized personnel from viewing sensitive payroll data, WebFDD has a redaction feature that lets the sender hide parts of a document.
In the accounts payable department, Hillco uses Lawson’s web portal interface to grab the needed fields and build a URL to Feith’s WebFDD. This process is enabled by inserting a button on Hillco’s AP Invoice screen. Hillco can then open the document (invoice) in another window when needed. The process works very well for Hillco and the integration between the three systems was very easy to implement.
The scalability of FDD has also made it easy for Hillco to move from its original small installation to the more extensive system in place today. “Feith’s support engineering team has been very responsive and helpful, and they got everything done on site and on time,” Jefferson commented. “For example, there was a great deal of work involved in the migration to NT because we were also migrating from an Informix database to Oracle, but the Feith people took the time and attention to get it all done right.” That was especially important, given the scalability issues that Jefferson needed to address. “When we started, we had a 1GB magnetic partition, a 20-disk jukebox, and a 1.2GB optical disk drive. Now, we’ve expanded far beyond that. We moved to a cluster of 4 Windows NT servers, along with two 5.2GB 80-disk cabinets,” he said. “We installed FDD and loved it. When we added the jukebox, it worked, just like it’s supposed to.”
Continuing Success:
Based on the success and improved efficiencies Hillco has already realized with Feith, the company is now considering adding another component to its Feith installation that utilizes voice response technology. This will be used by Hillco to fax benefits information to employees via a completely automated voice recognition system.
Hillco has earned a well-deserved reputation by taking care of people. Feith is earning its stripes by taking care of the documents which help Hillco provide better continuing service.