Case Study: Boosting Invoice Processing Efficiency by 600% With Automation

The Company:

H&H Purchasing is a purchasing and management group with an edge, based in Florida, United States. They are on a mission to provide customers with superior service and to maximize savings through purchasing efficiencies, without ever compromising quality or integrity of service.

The Challenge: Manual invoice processing

Managing the purchasing of food and supplies for clients, including schools and summer camps across the US, the team processes large volumes of invoices daily, from a range of suppliers. Prior to zenphi, all invoices were processed manually, taking months to manage thousands of documents accumulated over the summer period. As a fast growing company, these manual processes were not scalable or manageable, and were only going to hinder future growth if not addressed quickly.

The Solution: Automating repetitive processes with zenphi

Josh from H&H got in touch with zenphi during their peak invoicing period, hoping to ease some of the pain created by their manual processes.

Initially, Josh was only looking for a solution to automatically rename and store PDFs in Dropbox for their clients, but zenphi achieves much more for the company.

Zenphi provides a complete invoice processing solution from renaming PDFs on arrival, to accurately extracting key information, exporting to CSV files, routing this information through their verification workflow, and saving the files in Dropbox. Exceptions are automatically exported to Trello, ensuring humans are brought into the loop only when necessary.

The Result: A 600% increase in invoice processing efficiency, significant accuracy boost, and tens of thousands of dollars saved in the first 3 months

Prior to zenphi, during the same period up to 9 additional team members were required to help process and verify the large volume of invoices, which would take months to achieve. This year, for the first time in around 5 years, the interns have been told to leave early, the rest of the team aren’t having to work overtime to keep up, and Josh predicts that no additional staff will be needed at all next time around – saving more than $85,000 in staffing costs during their 3-month peak period alone. For the H&H team, this is “life-changing”.

To put it into perspective, at a minimum, zenphi increases the team’s processing capacity by a reported 600%, handling every invoice the same day it is received. With further workflow enhancements and growth in the pipeline, this figure, and their cost savings, will only continue to increase.

Better efficiency, accuracy and visibility than ever before

By replacing months of manual work, zenphi significantly reduces the risk of human error, which easily slips in when team members are under pressure to meet deadlines. Accuracy and efficiency are “better than they’ve ever been”, and the team now have visibility of the entire process which has uncovered previously unknown submission errors that the management team can now easily keep a close eye on.

“Zenphi has a great UI that allowed us to customize workflows to fit our specific business needs. After we implemented their system, we not only saved time, we were able to reduce our workload significantly. Previously we were forced to outsource our Invoice verification process overseas, but with Zenphi, we were not only able to bring it back in-house, we reduced our costs and decreased our processing time significantly.” 

– Josh Cohen, Owner/President of H&H Purchasing

The journey ahead

Following the wrap up of their peak invoicing period, the team already have 5 new project ideas with zenphi lined up. To Josh, it seems like every day they discuss problems in other areas of the business, and discover that zenphi can provide a solution.

In the coming months, they envision building multiple flows to better manage the onboarding of vendors and members, and then switch focus to their confirmations department where they’ll use zenphi flows to extract email data for easier management of all inbound emails and communications, keeping quality and timely customer service a priority.

Watch this space – this is just the beginning!