Keywords: e-invoicing, einvoicing, electronic invoicing, Tradeshift, shared services, finance shared services

Building the business case for e-invoicing: A Case study from Anglia Support Partnership

Susie West | Article | 14 September 2012

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Anglia Support Partnership was founded in 2002 as a local shared services organisation. Its mission was to provide better value for money for the NHS. Their shared service aimed to standardise processing and apply technology to drive efficiency. Focussed on performance, their mission was to deliver better service performance for less money, harnessing the value of sharing scarce skills and achieving economies of scale.

With an annual turnover of £36m, 49 NHS customers and approximately 600 staff, the shared service provides a broad range of support services primarily to NHS organisations that includes: Financial Services and Finance Systems, Payroll, Estates and Property Management, ICT and Patient Meals. Over two operational bases, they process in excess of 450,000 invoices per annum and have over 10,000 suppliers. Before implementing e-invoicing, invoices were entered on ledger via OCR or manually.

At our annual Accounts Payable Tech Summit, Nick Wood, Corporate Director and Jacqui Goulbourn, Head of Financial Services at Anglia Support Partnership presented their decision to move towards e-invoicing.

Why move to e-invoicing? Anglia Support Partnership looked to implement e-invoicing to reduce the burden of handling invoices, reduce time delays in receipt of invoices, reduce transactional costs, achieve efficiency savings and release funds for the frontline care.

After reviewing several solutions, they ultimately chose Tradeshift as it was simple for suppliers to use, and provided a quick return on investment. As Tradeshift is free to use for suppliers, this figured into the business case which considered the overall costs of solution, both to suppliers and Anglia Support Partnership. They also said suppliers found Tradeshift easy to use and adopt as it has a similar looks and feel to non-work applications i.e. Facebook.

In their business case for moving to e-invoicing, their priorities were:

• Reduce headcount, with milestones in the first year and in the 3-5 year range
• To get 70% transactions processed through e-invoicing in the first 3-5 years
• To ultimately have all invoices processed by e-invoicing, diminishing the use of OCR and having very limited manual input

While still early in the e-invoicing process, they felt Tradeshift was a good return on investment, reducing cost per transactions, and making Anglia Support Partnership more competitive in market. In sum, this solution allowed them to onboard 70% of suppliers with a winning ‘free e-invoicing for suppliers’ business case able to significantly reduce the cost-per-transaction in accounts payable.

This year sharedserviceslink.com’s The Accounts Payable Tech and e-Invoicing Summit 2012 takes place in London on 4th-6th December and will have a strong focus on e-invoicing and streamlining AP.