Before Auditoria
A healthcare operator with 18,000 employees and 100 facilities across several states had a typical problem in which their supplier base billed each site separately (one facility can carry eight separate electricity accounts, for example), and 90% of their spend is non-PO related. Every time a supplier emailed asking about payment status meant someone in the Accounts Payable department had to manually handle it (logging into the ERP, searching for the information, composing a reply, double-checking everything). This process alone took twenty to thirty minutes per inquiry.
Financial Systems Specialist, Large Healthcare Operator
The manual process slowing things down
Around 90% of spend at this large healthcare operator is non-PO, so suppliers cannot look up their own status, they have to ask. Add more than a hundred facilities that each bill separately, and site managers chasing payments for their own buildings, and you get a mailbox
where invoice submissions and payment questions arrive in the same queue, 169,240 times a year.
Financial specialists would have to upload invoices by hand, 50 separate files sometimes, to the ERP and would spend hours manually sorting PDFs into specific folders – not only a tedious job but prone to errors. Each answer to a supplier had to be manually researched, crafted, reviewed, and approved before going out.
How Auditoria improved the financial workflow
Auditoria’s AP Helpdesk agent reads every email that lands in the mailbox, works out what the sender is asking for, and checks the sender against the supplier record in the ERP before anything goes out. A payment-status question gets the invoice, amount paid and amount outstanding pulled from the ERP and follows the established policy before replying back. Exceptions are handled by finance specialists, significantly reducing the workload and improving response times. Invoices get a duplicate check, then go straight to capture.
The AP coordinator now focuses on reviewing answers instead of chasing unopened questions, and AP specialists who had spent their days looking things up moved onto work the department had never had capacity for, such as Medicaid consolidated billing review, which needs analysts to check that prompt-payment discount windows are being met.
“That was where we were seeing a lot of downtime, suppliers kept asking about updates, and we were seeing a lot of delay in payments. With Auditoria’s AP Helpdesk on board there is no downtime.”
Financial Systems Specialist, Large Healthcare Operator
