7 Reasons To Automate Supplier Statement Reconciliation

Watch this video to hear from Steven Petty, Finance Service Centre Manager at SAICA, about the 7 reasons to automate supplier statement reconciliation.

Paper and packaging company SAICA is automating its reconciling supplier statements with Statement-Matching.com.  SAICA, which also provides waste collection and disposal and energy generation, adopted the technology after a move to centralised invoicing saw the number of invoices handled by its Finance Shared Service Centre increase by 43%, from 70,000 to 100,000.

Using Statement-Matching.com removes labour-intensive administration from SAICA’s statement reconciliation process.  Statements received are scanned into the system, which automatically cross-references them with the invoice reconciliation processing system into which the constituent invoices and credit notes have been received.  Any documents missing from the statement are flagged, so that SAICA’s accounts payable team can proactively request them from suppliers. Rather than waiting until an overdue payment indicates that they have not been received.

Why is reconciliation important? It makes it straightforward to recover ‘un-allocated cash’, such as payments to suppliers that cannot be matched to an invoice. We therefore ensures reconcile invoices and credit notes are in the system faster. Making it easier for SAICA to recover VAT quickly and accurately within the correct accounting period.

The combined effect of these factors is improved cashflow for SAICA.

“Automating our system with Statement-Matching.com has resolved the challenge we faced as a result of the increase in invoice volume. For example, a statement that could previously take up to two days to reconcile can now be completed in an hour and a half,” explains Steve Petty, Finance Service Centre Manager at SAICA.  “The cloud-based nature of the Statement-Matching.com technology is also critical to us as it makes the system low maintenance from an IT perspective and accessible to remote internal customers.”