Nonprofit aging services organization experiences enterprise-wide efficiency with AP Automation.

Situation

Ohio Masonic Home is a not-for-profit organization – meaning any profit is reinvested back into its communities, and to the enhancement of its employee culture, providing a superior experience for those they serve. Ohio Masonic Home offers three premier lifestyle communities across Ohio, including Springfield, Browning and Western Reserve Masonic Communities.

With three campuses in three cities across the state, invoicing was messy, inefficient and inaccurate. The goal was to streamline old and unproductive processes, in order to meet the demands of suppliers and process invoices in a more timely fashion.

“We wanted to make sure we could follow all of our accounting rules and get everything paid promptly and applied to the right month,” said Josh Robertson, Corporate Supply Chain Manager at Ohio Masonic Home.

In addition to dealing with late or non-existent payments, Ohio Masonic Home employees were performing menial tasks, and Robertson knew that their time could be better allocated toward more pertinent projects. These employees spent at least eight hours a week just tracking down invoices, opening the mail, scanning in the invoices, creating logs of each invoice and sending them. To make the situation more cumbersome, they were collecting vendor invoices just once a week, and then following up with every manager to process them. They were stuck in the paper world and burdened with manual processing and data entry.

Solution

Ohio Masonic Home team took a hard look at all their processes and procedures to improve efficiency and give the accounting staff the opportunity to focus on accounting versus the mundane clerical tasks of accounts payable.  From there, they made the decision to invest in technology to streamline their business. MetaViewer Paperless Automation’s easy-to-use and intuitive user interface won over Ohio Masonic Home’s team.

“Having to train 50 users on a new system was a concern of ours,” said Alex Edgel, Ohio Masonic Home Accountant. “We have an accounting system, a forecasting system, a budgeting system – and that’s a lot of software to keep people trained on and we didn’t want to throw a whole new textbook at them.”

The team wanted something simple, hands-on and that provided accessibility to all of their financial data. It was also crucial that their automation solution tightly integrated with their Microsoft Dynamics GP solution.

The MetaViewer team worked closely with Ohio Masonic Home managers and dove deep into their automation needs. They took into consideration how many hours a week they spent looking at and processing invoices and the manual work that went into these procedures.

“It was remarkable what went into processing an invoice when we sat and thought about it,” Robertson said.

They concluded that an automation solution was needed to make the AP department’s job more efficient, and also allow them to expand into other areas of the business for enterprise-wide visibility and paperless automation.

Results

The implementation of MetaViewer led to time savings, money savings and dramatically less frustration for the accounting and AP teams.

“MVR allowed us to have immediate input, get rid of thousands of paper invoices that we previously had to deal with, free up other employees that were focusing too much on accounts payable and leave that specifically to the AP department,” Edgel said.

Overall, the MetaViewer solution has saved Ohio Masonic Home employees time, which is able to be reallocated to other projects. As a smaller company, Ohio Masonic Home has a one-person accounts payable department which, when Robertson started at the company, was a full-time job. Today, using the system has cut down on almost a full day of work on each of the three campuses – work that initially didn’t have anything to do with accounts payable.

Additionally, Ohio Masonic Home has experienced at least 10,000 hours of labor savings just on invoice processing, and over $250,000 in hard savings since MetaViewer now takes the guesswork out of processing invoices by eliminating mistakes, capturing discounts and permitting prompt payments. “MetaViewer has cleared the campus of paper, which saves money and frees up the managers’ time to focus on what they’re supposed to be doing – managing the needs of our residents,” Edgel said.

The most prominent result that Ohio Masonic Home has seen is growth; in savings, in efficiency and overall as a more strategic company. “We went away from manual processing and manual entry, and we can see that we’ve taken the invoicing burden and buried it,” Robertson said. Utilizing automation has also allowed them to cut down accounts payable processing by at least three-quarters. It has improved the financial literacy of the entire campus and all of the managers, allowing them to see how invoicing flows throughout the entire organizational system, have more access to Microsoft Dynamics GP and continue to improve so that budget accuracy keeps increasing.

Cost savings and improved efficiency are other secondary benefits of MetaViewer that both Edgel and Robertson reported. And today, Ohio Masonic Home team is already looking toward expansion of MetaViewer to other areas of the company, including human resources. From savings to growth to future expansion, being strategic in their technology investments has allowed Ohio Masonic Home to go from paper-burdened to streamlined and agile.

“We couldn’t do that without investing in technology. If we had stayed in the paper-burdened world, we wouldn’t be where we are now.”