Smiles Dental is in the oral dental care industry with 57 practices across UK. They provide high quality, innovative dental treatment. From July 2007 to July 2009 the business had grown from 32 practices.
Smiles Dental approached TopSource Worldwide to provide a long term solution to deal with on-going accounting work and to provide a scalable solution to manage huge invoice volume.
Smiles was faced with a 45-day backlog of invoice processing, no electronic copies of supplier invoices, and poorly reconciled accounts.
TopSource Worldwide provided a Portico DocFlow solution to Smiles Dental for workflow approval, and electronic storage of purchase invoices. TopSource Worldwide receive invoices directly from suppliers and from Smiles Dental, scan these invoices and archive them on the Portico Storage solution. This allows invoices to be searched for by a number of fields by any authorized Smiles Dental employee.
In addition to archiving the invoices they are routed to the correct invoice approver, based on a pre-agreed matrix, for the approver to review the invoice on screen and decide whether to approve or not.
Standardisation of reporting formats and the creation of process flow diagrams also helped Smiles Dental review their costs more easily. One benefit of this information was the move to common utility suppliers across all practices, generating considerable annual cost savings.
Once received and approved. TopSource Worldwide code and process the invoices directly into the Smiles accounting system.
Smiles Dental can now manage a well-controlled and documented process for their invoice approval and purchase ledger processing, which can scale as their business grows.
Portico provides 24/7 access to documents which can be easily searched, and allows accountability of local P&L accounts as invoice approval is obtained from individual sites.
"TopSource Worldwide have transformed how our business deals with suppliers and invoices, and have provided a solution which allows for rapid invoice approval by our Practice Managers wherever they are in the UK. This gives them real control of costs appearing in their P&L and gives the central team the ability to chase sites for approval as required.
We could not operate such a system in house without these systems, and without incurring significant additional cost."
Greg Lynch, Finance Director
www.smiles.co.uk
