- Industry: Retail / Wholesale
- Location: USA
- Application: Accounts Payable / Accounts Receivable
- Document Types: invoices, delivery tickets
Grocery market digitizes accounts payable process across multiple locations, resulting in higher staff productivity and speedy cost research
Farm-stand like grocery store and garden center, Adams Fairacre Farms, implemented DocuWare to achieve a streamlined and paperless accounts payable process.
Content
Adams Fairacre Farms
With four locations in New York’s Hudson Valley, Adams Fairacre Farms began as a family run farm stand and has expanded into a Super Farm Market complete with Garden Centers. Their stores offer local fruits and vegetables, meat, seafood, deli, cheese, prepared foods, sweets, gifts, garden centers, as well as Landscaping, Fence and Power Equipment divisions. Adams prides itself on providing local items and farm stand quality every day.
Each store does its own buying. With 100 managers between all locations, Adams receives and processes over 2500 invoices a week. Most of these invoices are delivered with the goods. The company’s paper-based accounting processes were inefficient and lacked transparency, so the company began looking for a new solution.
Requirements
The Tasks
- Simplify cost analysis
- Implement a transparent accounting workflow
- Free up storage space for more offices
Adams chose DocuWare because of its flexibility, Intelligent Indexing capabilities and cost. Once invoices are indexed and stored in DocuWare, the information is automatically imported into their Sage accounting program. This eliminated data entry, improved accuracy and sped up the entire workflow.
Solution
The ability to research costs and the increased transparency of accounting information is the biggest benefit DocuWare has brought to Adams. The accounting staff can quickly verify where an invoice is in the process and invoices are never lost on someone’s desk. Once the system was installed, several managers discovered that different stores were being charged different prices for the same item from the same vendor. For high volume items, even a small price difference can be very significant. Armed with this information, the manager was able to renegotiate and get better pricing for his store.
“Managers in our satellite stores did not have the ability to research prices and even those at the headquarters store were limited in the amount of cost research they could do with a paper system. DocuWare is a game changer. It has empowered our employees with the research tool they needed and helps them negotiate the best possible price,” said Mike DeCiutiis, Director or IT for Adams Fairacre Farms.
Benefits
The Benefits
- Employees are empowered with self-serve access to cost information, helping them secure better pricing.
- Digitizing invoice approvals streamlined and simplified the process.
- Audits are stress-free and painless for the accounting staff.
With DocuWare in place, department managers have self-serve digital access to information and the tool they needed to do their jobs well.
“Even our most basic computer users had no problem understanding DocuWare and how it could improve their work life. The software was very easy for them to grasp,” said DeCiutiis.
Additionally, the accounting department no longer receives requests to pull cost information from managers saving them over 44 hours a month.
With the move to digital documents, the accounting department was able to easily access information from large orders with many line items. Today, even when a lump sum payment is made to a vendor, the accounting staff can easily access the invoice details, down to which items were broken, bad or missing and easily verify if the proper credit memo was issued. In fact, interactions with vendors have been significantly streamlined. When a vendor calls asking about a short payment, the information is instantly available while on the phone, all without combing through papers files and waiting to call the vendor back.
“With DocuWare, we were able to customize our workflow. We estimated that with our paper process, an invoice was touched at least 10 times through the workflow, now our average is only 3 times,” said DeCiutiis.
Adams onsite filing room contained over 30 filing cabinets and was only able to store 18 months’ worth of invoices. Today, the filing cabinets have been removed and the space was renovated into more offices.
Conclusion
In addition to the many benefits already mentioned, audits are also now painless. Annually, auditors select random items from the store shelves and ask to see the cost and most recent purchase documentation. With DocuWare’s full-text search feature, auditors are given access, so they can search for the requested documents themselves, eliminating hours of work for the accounting team.
“Managers in our satellite stores did not have the ability to research prices and even those at the headquarters store were limited in the amount of cost research they could do with a paper system. DocuWare is a game changer. It has empowered our employees with the research tool they needed and helps them negotiate the best possible price."
Mike DeCiutiis, Director or IT, Adams Fairacre Farms
