Case study: Banktech delights users and suppliers with automated invoicing and expense management

Founded in Sydney in 1991, Banktech has evolved from an ATM deployer into a diversified payments business. Its portfolio includes the CashConnect ATM Network, UTOPIA Gaming Systems (including Global Gaming), and EFTEX payments. Currently, The Banktech Group and its subsidiaries process more than 700 million transactions annually, amounting to $50 billion in transaction value across Australia, India, the Philippines, and Cambodia.

Prior to implementing SAP Concur solutions, Banktech was concerned that its manual travel and expense management (TEM) and accounts payable (AP) processes were jeopardising its industry reputation, and its overall employee productivity and satisfaction.

Banktech had a manual AP system that was becoming very painful for the organisation and also had the potential to damage its relationships with suppliers.

The Banktech Group case study

Banktech delights users and suppliers with automated invoicing and expense management

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Challenges and opportunities

• Manual processes jeopardising its reputation and employee productivity and satisfaction
• Minimal visibilty and control on cash, operational inefficiencies

Why SAP Concur

• Proven global track record and extensive installed base
• Ability to integrate bidirectionally with SAP Business One
• The digitalisation of accounts payable and expense management
• Creation of a better experience for employees and AP team
• Better visibility and control of expenses and invoices
• Opportunity to create greater efficiencies and automation in Finance processes
• Creation of a better experience for suppliers

Value-driven results

• Complete visibility and control of cash
• Increasing accuracy and efficiency
• Improved employee experience and staff satisfaction
• 80% Banktech invoice transactions processed more quickly
• 90% Reduction in the time taken to source sample invoices and provide them to auditors.

“The experience with SAP Concur has been one that’s made us more efficient, delighted our users and given us a great deal more transparency.” Mark McRae, Group Chief Financial Officer, The Banktech Group

Maintaining positive relationships with suppliers, improving overall operational efficiencies and employee experience

“We've always prided ourselves in this company of being good payers. We have good relationships with our suppliers. We need our suppliers to service our customers, and part of that partnership is paying within reasonable terms. You don't know that an invoice is overdue if it's been sitting on somebody else's desk for the last four or five weeks. Having that visibility to know that we are paying within reasonable commercial terms and what has been agreed to with each supplier is critical,” said Mark McRae, Group Chief Financial Officer for The Banktech Group.

Before Concur Invoice, there was little control or visibility on cash in the business, and Banktech’s finance team was expending unnecessary time and effort making payments outside of the normal weekly run, tracking down unpaid invoices, matching invoices to POs and dealing with suppliers chasing up payments.

From a TEM perspective, Banktech had already been using Concur Travel through its third-party travel management provider, but this system didn’t extend to cover the full TEM process. Staff were working with a spreadsheet that caused a lot of frustration. The spreadsheet wasn’t user-friendly, which meant a lot of claims were being rejected and resubmitted for various reasons, which also delayed expense claim approvals and staff reimbursements.

A significant global footprint and proven implementation expertise

In assessing TEM and AP automation solutions, Banktech had shortlisted three suppliers before selecting SAP Concur and its implementation partner FUJIFILM MicroChannel. This was based on SAP Concur’s significant global footprint and FUJIFILM MicroChannel’s proven expertise in deploying SAP Concur solutions and integrating them with SAP Business One.

“I'm always mindful that there can be issues when you're integrating a system with your ERP. The fact that FUJIFILM MicroChannel had implemented SAP Concur solutions with SAP Business One 60 times before gave us a lot of confidence,” said Mark McRae.

The integration between SAP Concur offerings and SAP Business One is bidirectional. All the invoices and expenses approved in the SAP Concur solutions during the day are imported into SAP Business One overnight, and all the POs, goods receipts and vendor master data in SAP Business One are automatically loaded into Concur Invoice on a daily basis.

Extensive pre-project planning and testing ensured success and user acceptance

From the very first project meeting, Banktech had expert guidance from FUJIFILM MicroChannel. Initially, that was to ensure that the initial set of requirements were fully developed and understood by all parties, and that the range of potential scenarios and challenges were fully explored.

FUJIFILM MicroChannel provided a preparation kit that helped in a collaborative effort on developing plans for change management and communications, as well as identifying key users and developing a training plan around them. That ensured Banktech’s team could design its own training programs and roll those out to internal users and teams before go-live.

With Banktech implementing both Concur Expense and Invoice, extensive mapping of manual processes, general ledger codes and user roles was also needed. FUJIFILM MicroChannel’s templates were effective in gathering all the basic information required to start the project. Extensive testing, which included putting six months of data into SAP Concur solutions, gave the project team confidence that the software tool was capturing every scenario, and ensured they were comfortable being able to train other users in the business.

“FUJIFILM MicroChannel shared a lot of knowledge with us through multiple workshops, and they also supported us during several rounds of testing. By the time we reached the final stage of implementation, our project team was confident and competent enough to deliver the in-house training ourselves and conduct the rollout,” said Daria Fan, Systems & Business Process Accountant at The Banktech Group.

Complete visibility and control

Banktech’s concerns about industry reputation, control and visibility on cash in the business, and the unnecessary effort required from the Finance team to manage AP processes have largely disappeared.

“With Concur Invoice, those problems go away. You've got to train your suppliers to send everything to the SAP Concur mailbox, but once that's achieved, you have complete clarity,” said Mark McRae.

Now, Banktech has complete visibility on invoices and their status thanks to the Concur Invoice dashboard.

“With Concur Invoice, you see how many invoices come in on a daily basis. You know how many the team is processing, where the backlogs are, and which ones are being sent to your ERP system. If you are worried about how your team is coping with the workload, in a second, the dashboard will tell you how things are going. It gives me confidence, from a payable side, that it's in control, and if it's not, you know how to take action to get it back into control,” said Mark McRae.

Increasing accuracy and efficiency

SAP Concur’s AI automation capabilities have also improved the accuracy of both the OCR for scanned paper invoices and also the general ledger coding.

“80% of our transactions go through a lot faster, meaning our team only has to deal with the 20% that are less standard,” said Mark McRae.

That’s given AP more time to check and ask for advice on those transactions that are more complex, which has reduced coding errors.

Concur Invoice has also made it much easier for Finance to find historic invoices. Previously, users had to log into the ERP system, find what batch the payment was in, go to the payment run and pick up the copy of the invoice. With Concur Invoice, users can simply search on the supplier, and click on the invoice. For example, it now takes 10% of the time to source sample invoices and provide them to the auditors.

“With SAP Concur solutions, because it's automated a lot of the mundane tasks, the team has more time for more interesting and value adding activities.”Mark McRae, Group Chief Financial Officer, The Banktech Group

A game changer for staff

Rolling out Concur Expense, together with the ExpenseIt mobile app, was a “game changer” for Banktech’s travelling sales and field service teams explained Mark McRae.

“Going to Concur Expense, being able to trap the transactions as they were incurring and snap a copy of the receipt with their phone was a huge win. It's not often that you make a sales team happy with something that's administrative.”

In addition to taking expense receipt photos on-the-go and automatically capturing and categorising expense claims, Banktech staff can use the SAP Concur mobile app to check on the status of their expense claims and receive updates when that status changes.

A lot of the complexities around tax rules and expense codes have been removed from the end user, ensuring claims are processed more rapidly and efficiently. For corporate card holders, all their credit card transactions are automatically loaded into their account in Concur Expense, so they can easily verify and reconcile those costs.

To ensure user acceptance, Banktech adapted SAP Concur’s training materials to design bespoke courses for its staff. That included user guides and short videos easily accessible on Banktech’s intranet to provide users with prompts on how to complete their expense claims. That’s also been effective for onboarding new employees.

“The experience with SAP Concur has been one that’s made us more efficient, delighted our users and given us a great deal more transparency,” concluded Mark McRae

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