Purchase-to-pay specialist Palette has won Australian building firm Simonds Homes as its 1000th customer, following a contract win by business process outsourcing (BPO) provider Converga.

Converga will use the PaletteArena accounts payable suite to deliver hosted invoice automation and management services for Simonds Homes, giving them a fully automated, paperless invoice processing solution to improve efficiency and reduce costs.

Peter Kelly, CIO of Simonds Homes said: “Our current Timberline Accounts Payable (AP) module requires manual input, which was proving to be timeconsuming and costly to manage.  PaletteArena is an entirely automated purchase-to-payment suite offering complete visibility of both purchasing and invoicing and we are confident that it will significantly reduce AP invoice processing, saving us both time and money.”

Following the deployment of PaletteArena, Simonds Homes expects a 65% reduction in processing time with a high percentage of automation, due to Palette’s ability to perform automated matching of invoices to purchase orders, and to apply appropriate workflow rules to pass invoices directly to the payments module without human intervention.

Simonds has been building homes in Australia for more than 60 years.  The company currently processes around 360,000 invoices every year, which are made up primarily of 7-day trade terms.

Lars Ola Petters, CEO of Palette said: “We are very pleased to announced Simonds Homes as our 1000thcustomer. It’s a significant milestone for us, and underlines the benefits that end users can gain from deploying our solutions directly or as a hosted service.  Working with our partners such as Converga, we are able to give customers a fully integrated AP automation
solution that delivers real efficiency gains and strong ROI, replacing paper-based routines and streamlining their accounting processes.”

“We are excited to be offering this Purchase-to-Pay application to Simonds and achieving the sale for Palette’s 1000th customer is a great start to our partnership.  Utilising the Palette workflow Converga is able to provide a fully outsourced solution including, scanning, P2P processing, validation and exception handling to our customers in Australia, New Zealand and Asia,“ said Brian Roberts, CEO for Converga.