US Beverage Giant Wins on Cost and Efficiency with DocStar AP Automation
28th February 2018
Epicor Software Corporation, a global provider of industry-specific enterprise software to promote business growth, today announced that Crescent Crown, which sells and delivers over 26 million cases of beverages annually, is leveraging the DocStar ECM AP Automation system, enabling the company to automate accounts payable processing to maximize efficiency for more timely payments with fewer late fees and lower labour costs.
The tenth largest beverage distributor in the United States, Crescent Crown Distributing, LLC was established in 2001 and currently employs over 1,400 workers.
Processing invoices manually across seven locations was time consuming and costly for Crescent Crown; the company was scanning and entering tens of thousands of invoices and checks into Microsoft Dynamics GP every year. The distributor lacked an automated, real-time record of incoming invoices and due to limited visibility into payment due dates, the company was incurring a significant amount of late fees.
After fully integrating DocStar AP Automation with its MS Dynamics GP platform, Crescent Crown now has insight into every invoice and check in the system and has dramatically improved efficiency through workflow automation.
“There are hundreds of miles between our facilities, and we require a vice president at each location to approve invoices,” said Neil Baier, vice president of finance for Crescent Crown Distributing. “Now that everything is digitized with DocStar AP Automation, we’ve not only streamlined our approval process and reduced errors, but our documents are no longer misplaced, and our late fees have gone down to almost zero. We’re much more proactive in paying our invoices on time, and we can be because of the great reporting and insight from DocStar.”
Combining intelligent data capture with the powerful workflow engine in DocStar AP Automation, Crescent Crown imports and automatically routes invoices so each vice president has immediate access to unpaid invoices that require their approval. DocStar AP Automation is easy to use and implement, enabling businesses to perform 2 and 3-way matching to identify errors automatically, gain better insight to capture more early pay discounts, and streamlines the entire AP process with electronic forms and automated workflows. DocStar AP Automation also integrates with any enterprise resource planning (ERP) or accounting system to eliminate “stare and compare” and duplicate data entry, and makes it easy to retrieve data, review invoices, and push them along the AP workflow.
“DocStar AP Automation enables businesses to drive cost savings through discount capture, penalty avoidance, and lower labour costs, while improving ease of access for payables-related information,” said Tom Franceski, vice president and general manager, DocStar. “We are delivering the AP change that is needed through powerful integration with ERP systems to quickly resolve exceptions with little to no manual intervention, and robust workflow support for improved visibility and faster processing which reduces per-invoice processing cycle time and costs.”
Eliminating late fees was just the beginning of cost savings for Crescent Crown. The company has also saved at least four to five hours per week of work stemming from manual entry of invoices.