Australasia’s best known travel agency group, Flight Centre, has selected Australian technology integrator Bernet to implement a Kofax document capture solution to automate its invoice processing system.

With over 11,000 employees worldwide, Flight Centre operates more than 2000 retail sites and businesses in 11 countries.

The company provides comprehensive leisure and business travel services for customers in Australia, New Zealand, the US, Canada, the UK, South Africa, Hong Kong, India, China, Singapore and Dubai.

Each year, Flight Centre processes over one million invoices and travel documents in over 20 currencies from over 5,000 suppliers operating in 30 countries. Incoming invoices contain product and service offering line items that include more than 15,000 different options for hotels and accommodations, tours, car rentals and more.

Catering to both corporate and individual consumers, some invoices have as many as 2,000 line items (one line for each booking).

Flight Centre also had to manage the wide span of supplier and vendor invoicing sophistication. On top of that, they had to process both physical documents received at their retail locations and invoices arriving as email attachments.

In addition to manual data entry of each invoice, the team also had to physically compare and match invoice details against customers’ confirmation slips and booking forms. To handle all of these activities, the company had nearly 30 accounts payable clerks at its Sydney-based processing centre.

To address these challenges, Flight Centre GP selected Bernet Pty Ltd., an Australia based technology integrator and a Kofax Certified Solutions Provider, to implement a Kofax document capture solution to automate its invoice processing system.

This solution is based on the leading information capture platform (Kofax Capture) and incorporates key technologies from Kofax Transformation Modules that enable advanced automated extraction and validation of invoice data. The system also featured Kofax Communications Server, which provides advanced email capture, allowing the agency to scan and exchange electronic information seamlessly within its system.

Additionally, it includes a Bernet workflow component that interfaces directly to Flight Centre’s Calypso booking system to match booking invoices. This component also enables accounts payable staff to better manage booking exceptions.

With the invoice automation solution in place, Flight Centre’s accounts payable team can now deal with the qualitative aspects of their job instead of being tied up with data entry and matching work. With immediate electronic access to high quality data, staff can quickly address and resolve customer and supplier issues, often within minutes rather than days or even weeks.

The solution also enables Flight Centre to better manage business volume fluctuations due to travel seasonality. This means that the company does not need to increase staffing during the busy holiday or summer travel seasons thanks to an automated solution that can be readily flexed to easily handle varying capacity needs.

Tony Carolan, Leader Flight Centre GP Treasury, said, “Our invoice processing solution has enabled us to stay ahead of the competition. We are poised for even greater growth, both in terms of business volume as well as product and service offerings, without having to agonize about increasing staff force in a like manner.”