5 Key KPIs for AP Professionals in Business Central (Video)

If you’re already questioning whether you have an effective data strategy that leverages KPIs to inform strategic decision-making, you are in good company. Watch this recorded webinar with PairSoft as they discuss benchmarks and top-performing workflow strategies meant to empower your AP team’s decision-making right now.

See also how PairSoft can help save time and money while seamlessly integrating to Dynamics/Dynamics 365.

Transcript below:

Melissa: Hi there, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. We’ve got Tammy Bower here from PairSoft today, and she’ll be talking about five key KPIs for AP professionals in Business Central. So, welcome, Tammy. Thanks for joining us today.

Tammy: Thank you so much. I appreciate the opportunity. Thank you.

Melissa: Great. Now, I’ll just let you take it away.

Tammy: All right, wonderful. Thanks so much. I appreciate you all joining and taking time out of your busy day to listen to this presentation. Just very quick agenda, we’ve got two points we’re gonna talk about. We’re gonna talk about the five most common KPIs, key performance indicators, and then we’re gonna see it in action. A little bit about me, I’m Tammy Bower, I’m a Senior Sales Solutions Consultant here at PairSoft. I’ve actually been representing the PaperSave brand for over 16 years. And prior to that, I sold accounting software, and prior to that, I was an accounts payable admin. So, over the 30 years, I’ve gathered a lot of information from the customers and the end users who are struggling with their AP automation and their day-to-day business processes that they do.

And so today, we’re gonna go through what we believe are some of the key performance indicators that right now if you’re in a manual environment, it’s very hard for you to measure. And so, you know, here’s a statement that you can’t manage what you don’t measure. And honestly, more importantly, you can’t measure what you don’t know, right? And so it’s hard to understand or know, how much does it cost to process an invoice for your organization? What’s the timing around getting an invoice approved from point A to point, you know, Z, and what’s being paid on time, what’s not being paid on time?

And so these are some of the key performance indicators that the most common data points that management and even on the end processors desk timeframe that they can’t manage, they don’t know. Like, this is one of the key areas that we believe is most important. And this is that understanding the invoice cycle time. And you’re gonna see these actually from my point of view in my demo environment. But what is the cycle time? If you are in a manual process…and when I say manual process, I mean, those invoices might come in via email, but you have a manual routing for approval, attaching them to an email and routing them out, sending that email with the attachment to an approver. And then that approver might send the email back, say, “Yes, I approve this, but it’s over a certain dollar amount, and now you’ve got to send it out to somebody else.” All of that takes time, and also adds the cost to the processing of that invoice.

And so, on average, what we find is that it takes 25 days for an organization, small, mid-sized company to get an invoice approved, right? That’s the cycle time, from the time it arrives at the door, whether that’s email or via mail, and the time it’s actually paid, it’s about 25 days. What we’re finding and what we understand is that high-performing automation tools like PaperSave by PairSoft can bring that average down to three days. Now, that doesn’t mean it has to be paid sooner. It just gets into your ERP system, and in this case, Business Central in a timely manner so that then you can manage the timing of the payment, right?

The second key performance indicator is the average invoice approval time. So we’ve got the cycle time, from the time that it comes into the organization until the time that it’s actually ready to be paid. It’s in the ERP system or in Business Central, and you’re ready to send out the check, or the wire, or the ACH, or however you’re doing that payment. But in between there is the average invoice approval time. And so if you’re not able to manage this…and a lot of times what happens is because you want to have that approval time lowered, not have a lot of days in between or weeks in between that approval time, what happens is that companies will get rid of some of those checks and balances, where if they want to have threshold approval levels, they tend not to do that, or they try to do it, but it’s not very successful because it lengthens that approval time. And so one of the things that an automated workflow tool can do is give accounting insight as to where the document is at any given time based on the due date. So what that enables you to do is identify those invoices that are coming close to the due date and notify those approvers that they need to approve items.

So if your average invoice approval time is, you know, 10 days, or a lot of times, it could be that 20, 25 days in some cases, well, now, if it’s a net 30, you have 5 days to get it into the ERP system and get it out and pay right before it’s late. So we can help you improve on that average approval time. And again, those key performance indicators, if you’re in that manual process right now where you’re routing documents electronically through email, or you’re putting them out on a network drive, someplace for somebody to go and find and approve, or you’re sending them out as paper to people, that is going to increase that cycle time and then the average approval time as well. So there’s also the key performance indicator will help you measure payment error rates. And what I mean by that is when you look at how invoices are being paid, it’s saying 45% of the business makes more than half of their payments via check. Well, that’s okay, and that’s where we are right now in technology in some cases. But if you’re able to reduce that, the number of checks that you’re sending out versus ACH or vCards, things like that, it’s gonna lower that payment error rate.

So anytime you have to mail something, the check, you’re taking a risk that, one, it’s gonna get delivered in a timely manner through the post office. Two, do you have the right address? Do they want their payments to go to their street address or to a P.O. box? And you’re having to keep track of all of that vendor information, right? And that could cause those payment errors and increase, again, that delayed payment which could incorporate a late fee on your end. So we can help you reduce that payment error rate as well through PairSoft pay and other ways to automate that for you. But I go back to that first statement, you cannot measure what you cannot track, right? So if you’re doing all of this manually, you are unable to track any of this. How many invoices do we pay via check? And how many of those get sent back or aren’t delivered and you have to reissue the check or vendors are constantly having questions on when was this mailed? And, you know, we haven’t gotten it and then you’re having to do all that reconciliation, right? So we can help you eliminate or minimize that payment error rate. Let’s sign out. I’m in the wrong place here. All right.

So this next slide is talking about the number of invoices that are processed per full-time employee. And again, I go back to the number of people that have to touch an invoice, whether it’s that mailroom that’s opening up from the mail or something that’s monitoring the email address that these invoices are coming in. They then have to route it to a person who has to approve it or, again, paper, right? If you’ve got multiple levels of approval, one of the things that I remember as accounts payable admin is the ping-pong effect that would happen. When I was accounts payable, we did have thresholds based on approval levels. Back then, it was all paper. I used interoffice envelopes. And I had a red folder that had all the copies of the invoices that I had sent out. And when they came back to me approved after I tracked the person down several times and said, “I haven’t gotten this back yet,” I’d look at it, and if it was over a certain dollar amount, I’d have to send it back out again to another person.

And we actually had three levels, so we had management, director, and VP. And each one of them had their own threshold, their own levels that they needed to approve. Well, if an invoice had to go to all three, it was a ping-pong, I sent it out, manager sent it back, I’d send it to the director, director would approve it, send it back, and then to the VP and back. That’s that ping-pong. A lot of companies, as I mentioned earlier, will not even bother with thresholds because of the time that that builds on the approval of a document. So you know the number of invoices per full-time employee, on average, an individual can approve five invoices per hour. That’s not very many. But if it’s an automated system, that increases to 30 with an AP automation tool. So, again, these are KPIs, key performance indicators, that right now you might not even know what that answer is, right? On average, what is the number of, you know, full-time employees that touch an invoice? Accounts payables is probably sitting in their heads right now counting the number of people. But now, you can understand that through an automated tool that will track that for you.

The last slide here is the cost per invoice. And so all of this, the time that it takes to get the invoice from point A to point Z, ready for payment, the time it takes to approve it in that window of just approval before it comes back to accounting, the time or the payment costs, the payment of that invoice and how it goes out, how you’re paying it via check, those thresholds that need to happen, the number of full-time employees that are touching those documents, all of this adds up to the cost per invoice that it takes to process one invoice, right? On average, now, it’s a big average here between $14 to $30, it’s a big average, but that will depend on whether you’re doing PO-related or non-PO-related invoices. Obviously, non-PO-related doesn’t have as many steps along the way, PO-related, you’ve got to validate against, you know, the receiving or the PO, and then if there’s discrepancies, you got to send that out. Maybe you gotta reach out to the vendor so that cost increase, right? But on average, with a high-performing automation tool, like PaperSave by PairSoft, we drop that down to $7. Now, again, if it’s non-PO, it can be as low as $3 per invoice. And that’s the national average.

So when you think about the cost of investing in an automated tool like PaperSave by PairSoft versus what you’re paying to manually process these invoices, the ROI speaks for itself. It really can reduce those costs, give accounting, the people doing these manual tasks, free them up to do other more important things like deal with vendors and, you know, negotiate better payment timeframes, terms, or discounts and things like that, where right now, you don’t have time to do that. All right. So those are the key or the top five, we believe, KPIs, key performance indicators. And so now, what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna see it in action. I’m gonna switch my screen over here. So bear with me, and I’ll confirm that you all should be seeing my homepage. Yes, you should be seeing my own page.

Melissa: Looks good.

Tammy: Perfect. Thank you. This is PaperSave. So PaperSave is a document management workflow automation tool, right? It integrates tightly with inside of Business Central. Now, I keep saying Business Central. We have other integration ends, but that’s what we’re gonna focus on today. So if you’re not using Business Central as your accounting system, let Encore know and we certainly can discuss PaperSave’s integration with other ERP systems. But today, we’re gonna focus on Business Central. So let’s first talk about those KPIs, those key performance indicators. Each one of these tiles on my homepage represents an area that I get to go in. And I always have a caveat that says I’m an admin. I get to go in and see everything. Obviously, you’re gonna be able to set security. But with PaperSave, you’re gonna be able to just anytime click on this API tile, and it’s gonna show you where you rank or where you stand in comparison to the PairSoft community, others using our tool within the organization. So this is worldwide, actually, because we have customers worldwide, and this is gonna take into consideration where you are. So if you are in Canada and you’re in our Canadian data center, then those are the statistics that you’ll be compared to or calculated with. If you’re in the United States, we have data centers in the United States. And then if you’re anyplace else, we have data centers in Australia as well. But let’s talk about this invoice cycle time. All right?

Now, another caveat, these KPIs on my screen are looking at my demo environments that I use daily to demonstrate the software. So by no means is it real accounting data. I mean, it’s real data, but it’s not something that, you know, is being calculated based on payments and things like that. But anyways, so mine might be a little weird. But the PairSoft community information is real, right? So if you look at this quadrant here, it’s saying that my average cycle time for an invoice is 15 days for last month, right? It’s looking at last month. Now, I had a better cycle time in July. Oh boy, May was not very good, right? In the community, one day, on average, that’s what it’s taking an invoice to go through this cycle of being captured into PaperSave and processed into the ERP system. That’s pretty good. Right? Now, this is looking at invoices with POs. And, you know, again, you see that 93% of the PairSoft community uses POs. Well, if you’re not in a PO environment now, maybe it’s something that you’d want to consider.

And again, it’s a whole different accounting process, right? We know that. But you can see that that’s where the community falls, right? Invoices paid on time, 99% of the invoices paid on time. So when we pull data in, and you’re gonna kind of see this when I go into some of the other areas of PaperSave, we’re actually pulling in the vendor information from Business Central with the invoice date, and we’re calculating based on the terms that you have set up or the due date that’s on the invoice, we’re calculating that based on the day that it’s been brought in until when it’s been processed. So the community is processing 99% of those invoices within the due date. Now, I don’t know what your process is and how you’re handling that. But if you have vendors who are charging late fees, or maybe they’re not even charging you a late fee yet, but they’ve taken their, you know, 45-day terms to 30 days to now maybe 15 days to, you know, pay upon receipt, that’s obviously because somehow down the road, you know, your relationship with that supplier may have been damaged because of late fees, late payments. Well, you can see that in the community here at PairSoft that on average, they’re paying 99% of their invoices on time. So that’s really good.

The cost per invoice is actually calculating based on where I am and the average of invoices that I’m processing per month and averaging that out. Again, if you take a manual process that you’re using now, then unless you’re using an automated tool now, it’s a manual process that may be routing electronically from an email, but it’s still manual filing, manual data entry, manual tracking down if an invoice has been approved or not, or reminding those people all of that is manual. It’s anywhere between $14 to $30. I think it’s $15 to $30. Right? Well, mine right now is at $3.50. Number of invoices processed per full-time employee, my performance is 143. All right. Again, that’s kind of a weird statistic on my demo environment only because it’s not a true accounting process, if that makes sense. And then the percentage of invoices I processed within a 24-hour period. So, again, you can kind of see what this looks like across the community. But these KPIs are areas that right now, there’s no way…again, if you’re in a manual environment, there’s no way to manage this and calculate this and determine if you’re following best practices, if you’re right, you know, in the sweet spot of industry standards and high-performing mid-sized range companies. You have no idea, right? This will give you snapshots every day, and I can look at it 6 months, 12 months, you know, and see how well I’m doing across different time periods.

So this is great information, especially from a management standpoint, those KPIs. But what about that daily process, that daily, “Where are my invoices? Who has them out of the office and hasn’t approved things?” Right now, again, I go back to that manual process, you either are keeping the list somewhere, or you have additional copies of them, and you are putting maybe reminders on your Outlook or your email to remind you to reach out to somebody. With PaperSave by PairSoft, you won’t have to do that. First of all, everyone gets email notifications reminding them that they’ve got invoices that they’ve got to process, whether that means that they have to approve it at whatever level of your workflow, or maybe it’s accounting reminding you you have work to do, which typically doesn’t necessarily have to happen, right? But maybe those approvals you do. But let’s see where those documents are and see my dashboard for today.

So I can click on this open workflow, and it’s gonna take me right to my dashboard. This dashboard, at an instant, is telling me I’ve got 139 invoices somewhere in my workflow, from the moment they arrived in PaperSave, what I call an AP validation step, to the very last step where I call an AP review before it goes into Business Central. You’re gonna see all of this in a second. And then any level of approval in between, there are 139 that total just over half a million dollars. I can see when they’re due right? And most importantly, not only can I see them, but I can drill down into them.

So if I was accounting, I’d be concerned about, you know, the ones that are doing one to five days, right? I can click on this, it opens up this list of eight. Now, I can see that Holly owns them. She’s the one who needs to approve them. I can see the vendor name, the invoice date, the dollar amount, the invoice number, if there are PO-related, if they’ve been coded. This view line item view is gonna be the coding of the invoice. And right here, I can say, “Okay, Holly, I need to send her…” even though the system has been reminding her on a daily basis that she’s got invoices, and she might have many more throughout those 130 some-odd, there might be more that Holly owns. But I’m concerned about these eight. So I’m gonna send Holly a very quick email. Come down to share email link, PaperSave has put all eight of these in one link. I can send this over hcondon. That’s her email address. And I can say “Hey, Holly, with a little note, these are due in the next one to five days. Can you please go in there and approve them?” All she’ll have to do is click on that link, and it will take her right to this screen. And she’ll be able to click on them and say approve or she can hit Approve right from here if she knows these vendors and looks at the invoice of lines. So she can either look at them individually or approve as a group.

I also can see by toggling these two arrows over here at the right, I can see where the workload of these 139 fall. So maybe I find out or hear that Lu Ann, one of my approvers team members out in the company that has to approve invoices, maybe I’ve heard that she had to leave for medical emergency unexpectedly and you don’t know when she’s gonna come back. All right, so I’m gonna go into these 10 for Lu Ann. I’m not gonna send her an email because I know she’s not in. I’m gonna redirect these. I’m gonna send them over to maybe her counterpart. Maybe I want to escalate them to her boss, I can do that as well. But we’ll go ahead and send these over to Yesenia, who happens to be a team member of hers that has the rights to approve.

So you’ll see that the owner now is gonna change from Lu Ann to Yesenia. Yesenia will get an email letting her know, “Hey, you’ve got some documents that have been forwarded or redirected to you.” And then I can go in and set Lu Ann’s out of office on because she was unable to do that and put Yesenia as her proxy so that anything that now throughout the time Lu Ann comes back that’s routed to Lu Ann based on business rules or whatever the workflow rules are will automatically be sent to Yesenia. And I don’t have to worry about it. Lu Ann comes back, turn her out of office on, and it’s business as usual. And just so that you can see, I’m gonna go into this. We’ll talk more about the screen in just a second. The PaperSave is tracking this. So I can see that Myles approved it. So we had two approvers over here Lu Ann and Myles. Myles approved it and it was in Lu Ann’s inbox, but I just changed it from Lu Ann to Yesenia. So PaperSave is building a workflow history on where that document is or has been and who performed the review action. So this dashboard immediately gives you insight as to where your documents are, what needs to happen to them.

Again, if they were late past due, they’d be broken down by, you know, number of days past due. I’d see vendors with the most past due on the largest past due. I do see here that ArcBest has 14 invoices somewhere in the 139 that total a certain dollar amount. And I can get to those. Maybe I want to look at just ArcBest. I now have drilled down into ArcBest the most invoices out there, and I can see where those are. So those are the dashboards. That is the crux of the KPIs, the key performance indicators, the dashboards, being able to take action on those invoices that pertain to your organization’s approval process. Well, how does all of that work?

And so we’re gonna spend the next, I don’t know, 15, 20 minutes going through that, capturing some documents, showing the OCR, the optical character recognition, where we’re gonna eliminate some of those manual processes that drive up the cost of processing an invoice manually doing data entry, manually filing, manually retrieving. We’re gonna talk about how we can delay the approval process time by those notifications. I showed you how you can do it by seeing where they are, right? But how can people approve them? If we can provide a better approver experience, what does that mean giving them options on how they can perform their work, right? Instead of always having to do it through email, maybe there’s some other options that they like better. If the tool, like PaperSave can do that, great, people are gonna approve things a lot quicker, right?

So let’s talk about that. Let’s take that dive into this process. So the process of getting documents into PaperSave really is simple, right? If you are receiving invoices via email to a central email address, or maybe you’re not, maybe you don’t have that central email address, we would encourage you when and if you implemented PaperSave to have the central email address, AP invoices @ your organization’s name.com You can configure, I’m not gonna configure, but you could configure PaperSave to look to that email address, and we will automatically pull in any attachment to an email.

So we’ll go ahead and send that off. We will automatically pull in anything that lands in an email inbox that PaperSave is monitoring. This isn’t for Business Central, but that’s okay, it’s gonna go to another ERP. I had that set up for something else. But we’ll look, we’ll take this attachment, and we’ll drop it right into the first step of your workflow. So PaperSave’s already looked at that. We don’t delete the email, we move it to a subfolder. Again, this will all be in your organization’s Outlook or Gmail or whatever mail server you’re using, and we put it in a process folder, that way, you know, “Hey, PaperSave has looked at that and brought it into the system.” When we bring it in, when we’ve captured that attachment and we bring it in, optical character recognition happens, OCR, you hear me say that. And what we’re doing is we’re pulling data, pulling values off of the invoice.

So the first step in my workflow is called AP Validation. All right? This AP validation, I’m gonna look at some of these newer ones up here, this AP validation is literally…the OCR is…or the AP validation is validating the information that’s been captured, right? So we pull the vendor name, the address block, we take that data, and we compare it to your vendor data inside of your ERP, or, in this case, we’re validating it against Business Central, and we populate it with the vendor name and the ID behind the scenes. We pull in the invoice date, the invoice amount, and the invoice number.

Now, if there’s a PO number on this invoice and there’s a PO in Business Central, we’ll pull in the line items as well. If not, if you’ve got default account numbers, we’ll pull those in. If you don’t have that, then it allows you to pull in and type in that account number. If you don’t know the account number, you can look up the account number. And this literally is pulling from the chart of accounts withinside of Business Central. So that is our tight integration. We do it for Business Central, we do it for Dynamics GP, and there are several other accounting systems. And I could certainly split this $10,000 across multiple accounts. But for time purposes, I’m going to just do one, if you’re using those dimensions withinside of a Business Central and you’ve identified a department and a location, we can even route the document based on those pieces of information. If not, then you can identify who do you want this to go to. And maybe I want this to go to Myles. And I just type in Myles’s name, and I’m gonna route it to him. It leaves my inbox, PaperSave workflow inbox, and it goes over to Myles. And I would do that for all of these invoices.

Now, I can quickly see that we found all the information, and I can say, “All right, I know that…” Maybe I want to filter it by vendor name. And I know that all Southern Kentucky always gets routed to, and I can mass update. And I know these always go to Lu Ann. And I know that Sullivan’s and Veritiv and WB Mason always go to rows. So I don’t have to go into them one at a time, I can now mass route them to those individuals, and it’s gonna tell me that I don’t have data in some of those fields, which I didn’t put in a review on each one. So it didn’t go on, it kept them here.

All right. So now, I’m gonna play the reviewer. This is the approver, right? Now, one of the things that I do want to talk about is how do people know that they’ve got invoices? Right now, they’re receiving an email from you, or somebody on your team letting them know that they’ve got an invoice and maybe it’s an attachment to that email, or, again, maybe you’ve sent them an email because you dropped documents in a folder out on the network drive, or maybe they’re looking at paper on their desk. Well, with PaperSave, what’s gonna happen is that they will start getting email notifications letting them know that they’ve got documents. So this is basically telling me…this is my email, it’s an older one, but it’s my email that says, “Hey, Tammy, you actually have 15 invoices waiting for approval. And here they all are.” Now, how do I get to them? I can click on this web hyperlink here and it would take me to my group of 15.

However, if I’m out and about and I’m working…and I like to work from my phone or my tablet or iPad, PaperSave has a mobile app that they’re looking at this email on their phone or tablet, they can tap on the hyperlink and it’s gonna open up a mobile app, or they can just open up the mobile app. And I would say it’s a true mobile app. And the reason I say that is, if you’re a shopper…I like to shop online. So if you’re a shopper and you’ve ever tried to order something from your phone from the website of Amazon versus downloading the mobile app on your phone, two different user experiences, right? The mobile app is much simpler, much more user-friendly, and intuitive. Well, that’s how our mobile app is. It’s very intuitive. And everything that you’re gonna see me do as an approver, they’re gonna be able to do on the mobile app. So they could tap on one of these hyperlinks.

We also know that people like to work from email. Maybe that’s the way that they work now they get attachments. Well, guess what? They can get an email that shows them where the document was coming from, what the GL distribution is, and then even what the email or the invoice looks like. And they can approve or reject right from here. All right? So there’s a lot of options. What does that mean? That means that they’re gonna be able to approve whichever way that they like. And maybe it changes from day-to-day depending on if they’re sitting at their desk or they’re sitting in an airport someplace and performing their work from their mobile device.

For today’s purposes, I’m gonna play Jennifer, and I’m gonna go in, and I’m gonna be an approver withinside of the workflow. So here’s Jennifer, she’s got…again, she’s got this whole list, right? If I close this, these are all Jennifer. She can see the dollar amount, the invoice number, the invoice, the vendor name. Maybe she wants to deal with, you know, the most higher-priced invoices. Well, she could filter on any of these columns. I’m just gonna do the first one.

Now, listen, if she is responsible for putting in the account number, you can give her that, right? She can type in the account number. I never remember the account number. So I apologize. I have to look these up. I have worked with a lot of accounting systems, so I never remember all of the numbers. But if she knows that it’s office supplies and she types that in, great. Now, listen, you cannot give her the right to do that as well. But really, all Jennifer has to do is hit Approve. This one’s $54. That might be within her threshold. But anything over $1,000 when she approves it, it has to go to her director, right? She doesn’t have to worry about that. All she has to do is hit Approve that, yes, she approves it, and the rules in the workflow will automatically route it to that next level of approver and she gets the next one in the stack. And maybe this one has to go to her director or the vice president. But again, does she have to worry about that? No, she just has to say, “Yes, it’s okay to pay,” or, “No, it’s not.” And if she says no, you can require her to give you a reason, “This is not mine.” All right, so she’s gonna reject it. And it’s gonna go back to a rejected step that maybe accounting views, and they would route it.

But Jennifer is always gonna be able to see where this document has come from. So this was routed back in January. So this is one of those really old ones. I always change my dates, though, for due dates. But this was routed to her a long time ago. Obviously, you would not allow them to sit in that inbox for that long. All right, so proving is very simple. But once it gets to that full level of approver, whether it needed to be just by that manager, or it had to be escalated because of the dollar amount, or some other rule that you might want in there, it’s IT related and had to go to the IT director, or what have you, ultimately, everything ends up back here in what I call AP review. This is that last right of refusal. So think about not having to touch the invoice to get it to that person, physically touch it, routing an email, right? I had to validate the information routed to that person, it doesn’t come back to me until the full level of approval has happened. Right? This one’s the $54 one, so it didn’t get escalated to anyone. And now, all I have to do with accounts payable is hit the Submit button. Now, just FYI, I am gonna change my invoice numbers here.

PaperSave communicates constantly with Business Central. And what do I mean by that? If this was a duplicate, which I know it is, I haven’t turned off, PaperSave is checking Business Central and I would get a bubble notification that says, “Hey, this is a possible duplicate. What do you want to do with it?” How do you know it’s a duplicate? You don’t know it’s a duplicate until you keep the data in, and then Business Central says, “This is a duplicate,” but you’ve already gone through all that hassle, right?

PaperSave is gonna tell you at that very first step when that initial invoice lands at the very first step of your workflow because we’ve done all of the data entry, a bubble would pop up that says, “Hey, there’s an existing transaction inside of Business Central for this vendor and invoice number. What do you want to do with it?” Well, we’re also gonna notify you here at this very last step because, listen, in the real world, somebody’s gonna come up to you with a paper invoice, you’re gonna go into Business Central… You probably would already have it open. You’re gonna go into Business Central and manually create that transaction. You’re still gonna be able to do that withinside of Business Central, and you’re gonna be able to keep the consistency of where those documents are stored because when you create a transaction, you’re gonna be able to add a document to PaperSave. All right? That’s what that is. And I’ll show you the end results in a second here. But I’m changing my invoice number because I’m gonna hit Submit, and I want it to go through. Because I had that turned off…I don’t have the duplicate check turned off in Business Central. If I don’t change the number, it goes into a rejected by Business Central step in my workflow. So just FYI. And we’ll go ahead and hit the next one.

And I’m always able to see where these documents have been, who’s approved them. And I could have another button here that says reroute. So I want to route this to somebody else because new vendor, I want somebody else to look at it. I can do that. Let me look up by number, not by name. Here we go. Okay, so we’ll do one more, and then we’ll get in and show you the final results of what this looks like. Okay. All right. Again, I don’t need to go into every single one of them. I can hit Submit All and it will create all of those transactions. But it is real-time, so here’s my Southern Kentucky that I just created. So, puts in the line items. Now, listen, I’m not doing PO-related, but we do work with the PO system or transactions withinside of Business Central as well. But when I want to see the document, if I’m a Business Central user, I just come up to additional and I say show document. PaperSave is gonna open up and it’s gonna give me that document that supports that transaction. So think about what manual thing I didn’t have to do. I didn’t have to manually keep the data in, I didn’t have to remind the approvers that they have things to do, the system’s doing that. I can see very quickly what is due in the next 5 days, you know, 6 to 10 days, 11 to 15 days, and so on. I don’t have to keep a list anywhere.

And at the end of the day, when I hit Submit from PaperSave, it automatically created that transaction, and I didn’t have to file the document. It did that on its own. That is the integration that we have with inside of Business Central. So, again, just navigating this so that you know it wasn’t a one-and-done. I’m gonna show the next one here. I got smoke and mirrors, right? It literally is doing it real time. I don’t have to update, I don’t have to sync, I don’t have to do an import. You can see this is Military Time, but this really is 2:45, 2:43 Eastern Time. All right? Now, a couple of other retrievals, because getting to one invoice…that’s good, that’s nice to have, being able to do that. But what about the end of the month or the end of the year, year-end, or, more importantly, when the auditors are in town? How do you get to the documents? Well, you can create these filtered lists over here in Business Central. That’s pretty awesome. I just have a real easy one that says between $5 and $1,500. Here they are, all of my invoices that are total between $5 and $1,500. I don’t have to drill down into each one of these to get to the documents.

PaperSave is under Actions, Actions, PaperSave, Show Documents. PaperSave now, I think that there’s like 65 transactions…68. Sorry, down here, it says 68. Look how quick that was. I don’t know about you, but as a former accounts payable admin, I could not have pulled 68 invoices that quickly. And in fact, 1 out of every 10 invoices are either lost or misfiled, so you wouldn’t have found all 68 of them anyways, right? So here they are. Now, if it’s me that wants to see them, I could flip through them like a slideshow, right? Again, always seeing the approval process, all of that, who approved it and when, and flip through them one at a time, however I want to look at these, right? Just on a side note, in addition to this workflow audit trail, PaperSave is keeping an audit trail for the life of the document, who viewed this?

So I viewed this today, but I also viewed it yesterday multiple times. Now, I’m the only one logged in. So it’s always my username. But that’s a good thing, right? You know who’s looking at these documents. Listen, if somebody’s leaving and you want to see, “Hey, what have they looked at? What have they done,” run the user log, and it will tell you what they’ve done. I looked at this one multiple times. But at this point, not only can I view them, but I can share them. Listen, you could print them out. I hope when you use PaperSave that you would never print out another invoice, ever, ever, ever again. But you could. You can save them. So you can save them out on a network drive someplace for those auditors. You also can email them. Now, 68 as an attachment might be a lot. But oops, I don’t know, I don’t have that configured. But I could email all of those out, and it would be a link, just like when I clicked on those eight that I emailed to Holly, right? Same thing, share that with the auditors. PaperSave gives you an unlimited number of users. We don’t charge per user.

So when the auditors are in town, send them the hyperlinks. They can just click on the hyperlink and flip through them just like you did. You can also download them as well. But those are just some of the areas that, again, from a manual process to a true automated system, you are able to track and measure areas that you currently can’t track and measure in a manual process, you can identify invoices that need to be moved along in the approval process, you can’t do that now, you can eliminate all of that manual data entry into Business Central, the manual filing, and the retrieval through Business Central is very powerful.

One last thing. Is anybody ever asked, “Hey, where do we buy this printer?” Or “Where did we get this chair,” whatever it is? And now, they’re asking accounting because they think that you can remember everything. PaperSave has content search. I like to type in the word uncle because it’s a unique word, and you don’t find that on a lot of invoices. But look at here, when I type in the word uncle, PaperSave has pulled every document in my database. Most of them are invoices that contain the word uncle. And again, I could flip through these like a slideshow, right? Might be the same invoices, but they are different instances. But I was able to find 79 invoices that contain the word uncle in seconds. And again, always have the ability to share them, export them into an Excel spreadsheet and manage them. Right? That’s the whole idea, manage them. What do I want to do with them? So let’s go back to the slide deck here. Hold on just a second. I’m going to change my screen here, see it in action, which we did. I don’t know. Do we want to open it up? Any questions? Were there any questions written in the Q&A area?

Melissa: I’ve got the Q&A area open here. I don’t have any questions in yet. But if anyone wants to put any questions in, just go to the question pane.

Tammy: All right. Yeah, we have a couple more minutes left. And, you know, typically, the next step would be to reach out to Encore and find out, you know…to schedule a demo, right? We can schedule a demo. We can provide you with some additional documentation. And I believe that this has been recorded so we can even share that, correct?

Melissa: That’s right. Yes, I meant to say earlier we did record this, and we will be sharing that out with everybody who registered today.

Tammy: All right. There aren’t any questions. I don’t know if anybody’s typing.

Melissa: I don’t see anything coming through. But, of course, like you said, they can always get in touch with Encore if they have any questions. And I will be sending out a follow-up email so you can always respond to that as well.

Tammy: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much. I appreciate the opportunity, and I look forward to doing one-on-one demos for your customers that are interested.

Melissa: Awesome. Thank you so much, Tammy. It’s been great having you.

Tammy: Thank you. Have a great day.

Melissa: Okay, you have a great day. Bye, everyone.

Tammy: Bye-bye.