Everyone knows it’s a tough job keeping track of car expenses; now try imagining the task when you multiply it by 75,000 vehicles under your control.

That was the challenge facing Aussie company sgfleet, the go-to guys for corporate vehicles in Australia that now has around 400 staff worldwide keeping people on the road.

A hosted accounts payable automation solution provided by Australia’s Dataline is now dealing with around 75% of the invoices which were historically processed manually, providing significant cost savings to the business.

Every month sgfleet receives in excess of 10,000 invoices directly relating to the service and maintenance of the fleet of vehicles it manages. The invoices are provided by a range of service outlets across Australia and all relate to the servicing and maintenance of vehicles.

“The Dataline solution has enabled us to process more invoices as our business grows without the typical costs associated with this,” said sgfleet CEO Andy Mulcaster.

“The suppliers have also benefited by having payments processed in a more streamlined manner. The new system has also helped in the quick resolution of any disputes with suppliers by providing instant access to electronic invoices, which can be searched for using a variety of fields.”

Established in 1987, Dataline has developed its accounts payable automation solution in addition to a range of payment processing services it provides major corporations and financial institutions in the Asia-Pacific region.

Dataline employs the EMC Captiva InputAccel product to process scanned invoices received over email, fax or post, and has developed its own Web portal to provide customer access to Invoice work flow.

Once they are scanned, sgfleet’s proprietary Online Reporting solution called “Fleetintelligence” allows Customers of sgfleet to retrieve an image of the invoice.

Using the Intelligent Document Recognition engine provided by the EMC Captiva Dispatcher, classification of diverse invoice types is simplified with automated data capture. Dataline has data entry staff to review the capture results and in combination with its web portal invoice validation rules, validating to Supplier and Purchase Order data supplied by sgfleet, ensures all exceptions are captured and presented to sgfleet for review.

“The invoices cover services such as replacement of a windscreen through to scheduled services as well as other ad hoc repairs. We deal with several thousand suppliers across all locations within Australia, therefore the variety and quantity of documents has become a significant issue from both a processing and a storage perspective,” said Mulcaster.

Each day sgfleet provides an automated output of all expected invoices, which is imported by Dataline and indexed in preparation for the actual scanned invoice once it is received.

Every paper invoice sent to Dataline undergoes optical character recognition, and the fields indexed earlier are matched to automatically produce a daily file to sgfleet with all invoices which have been matched correctly. Any invoices matched correctly are automatically processed in the sgfleet system and the suppliers are paid.

Any exceptions are presented via the Dataline online portal and the sgfleet Vehicle Maintenance department reviews them to determine why the invoice has not been matched successfully. These are then dealt with on a case by case basis to reprocess the data and have the matching function run through successfully.

One of the major sources for invoices is the dealer network, which has the job of maintaining all the vehicles under management. When a car is serviced or repaired an authority to work is given to the repairer by sgfleet’s National Maintenance call centre. Once the work is completed the invoice is sent in for payment.

“With the growth in the number of vehicles being managed through our Australian based business there was a dramatic increase in the amount of invoices that needed to be managed by the accounts payable office,” said Mulcaster.

The Accounts Payable automation solution implemented by sgfleet has delivered dramatically shortened invoice processing time and reduced document archival and retrieval times and associated storage costs.

Growth is now easier to manage as increased business volumes can be handled without having to increase accounts payable staff headcount.

“We now have improved Customer relations due to complete visibility over maintenance costs and providing access to invoices via Fleetintelligence has enabled a unique offering for our Customers as well as improved supplier relations due to improved payment workflow” said Mulcaster.