International Finance Automation for a Global Manufacturer

Reduce users’ time spent on manual, tedious processes for key financial and out-of-period sales reporting

Improve accuracy for data entry, invoice approval, and out of period sales reporting

Process: This process involves creating intercompany invoices to split the expenses to different entities for the services provided by common vendors and intercompany departments. In the current state, more than 200 hundred invoices are created from 25 companies across the world monthly.

Automation: Smartbridge designed a standardized automated process for each company to create the required invoices for the other business units within the organization. For the intercompany recharges, the automation runs the process end-end to validate the data, create the required intercompany recharge invoices, and then routes them for approval and posting. After the intercompany recharge invoices are posted, a detailed transaction summary is sent out to the designated resource for each business unit.

Results: The intercompany automation resulted in creating accurate invoices for all the companies and saved over 480 hours annually for the users to work on other high-value activities.

Process: Every month the customer receives over 1,000 invoices from different vendors for their respective products and services. In the current process, the accounting team reviews each invoice to validate the data then routes it to the appropriate approver based on the cost center and amount. The current process is cumbersome and time consuming to validate and select the proper approver based on the complexity of different business rules. This is causing the invoices to be routed to the wrong individual, resulting in delays to process the invoice.

Automation: The invoice approval automation segregates the incoming invoices based on purchasing type then disperses them to the designated approver. The automation uses multiple cross references to identify the proper approver based on the cost center associated to the purchase order, the total amount of the invoice, and the seniority level of the individual. The bot assigns the approver and routes the invoice to the respective approver for further processing. A detailed transactions summary is sent to the accounting team to audit and track the next steps for the invoices.

Results: Before the users begin their workday, the automation runs to streamline the invoice approval routing process. This invoice approval routing automation improved the accuracy of selecting the correct individual and the total time taken to process each invoice. This automation is saving the accounting team over 1,200 hours annually to focus on more strategic tasks.

Process: The 5-member finance team reviews over 5,000 sales orders at the end of every month to record them in the correct period based on their delivery date. The time-consuming process is very manual in finding the delivery partners websites to track the order and record the proof it was delivered. This process is essential for completing the month end process to close the period and takes roughly 400 hours annually to complete.

Automation: The out-of-period sales reporting automation solution runs daily at the end of each period to gather all sales orders that were not delivered in the month. The automation pulls all of the tracking information, records the proof of delivery from the partners’ tracking sites, and uploads it into their ERP system. This bot is designed to run every day at the end of the current period and a few days into the new period to process all the sales orders created in the period. The automation builds a summary report for the accounting team with the calculated sales amounts to be delivered after the period end from different plants. The summary report is used by the accounting team to record the sales in the right period.

Results: With the out of period sales reporting automation in place, the team is saving 400 hours annually to focus on improving customer experiences.

Process: Since the medical device manufacturer is headquartered in Europe and conducts business globally, they must meet the EU’s reporting requirements to account for the movement of goods between countries. This enables the USA government and the EU to track trade between countries for compliance purposes. They run this process in their ERP system to gather all the data needed to generate the Intrastat report for each country.

Automation: The Intrastat reporting automation creates the respective files for each country to submit to the government. The automation carries out the required processes in their ERP system to gather all of the monthly order information, reconcile the data, and summarize the amounts in a formatted template to submit to the EU.

Results: With the EU Intrastat reporting automation in place, the finance team is able to reallocate 480 hours annually for more strategic tasks.

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