PRESS RELEASE
Thanet District Council Saves 12 Hours a Week Using COA Solutions’ Invoice Data Capture Solution
3 March 2010 – Thanet District Council has improved purchase-to-pay efficiency by implementing an intelligent data capture solution from COA Solutions. This data capture solution, which is tightly integrated into the Council’s COA Solutions financial management system (FMS), has cut invoice processing time by 12 hours each week including reducing manual data entry of invoice information.
Thanet District Council required an invoice data capture solution to speed-up the processing of 17,500 invoices each year. Ginny Bax, Finance Manager at Thanet District Council, explains, “Our previous data entry process was very manually intensive. The departure of a part-time staff member placed additional pressure on us to maximise efficiency in order to prevent unnecessary disruption to the finance department.”
Bax continues, “The data capture solution’s ability to integrate into our COA Solutions finance system was key and we were confident that it would enable us to recover the working hours we were going to lose from the departure of the part-time member of staff.”
COA Solutions’ intelligent data capture system, which uses Version One’s technology, automatically captures and verifies data from scanned purchase invoices using advanced optical character recognition (OCR) technology. Any data discrepancies are automatically highlighted for the attention of the user before being uploaded to COA Solutions’ FMS accounts payable module.
Bax comments, “The integration of COA Solutions’ data capture solution into our finance system has saved the equivalent of 12 hours of staff time per week, reducing manual data entry whilst significantly improving invoice processing efficiency. We expect to save even more staff time moving forward.”