India’s largest storytelling platform offering multiple formats literature, comics, audio, and physical books.
The Problem
As the company grew from 1 vertical to 7 different verticals, the operational workload in terms of invoice processing increased exponentially. Also, the increase was not only in terms of quantity, but also in terms of complexity.” Malav Vasavada, the VP of Finance at Pratilipi, a series E funded startup in the storytelling domain cannot stress enough on the operational workload which had stressed his team to the hilt.
“Our small team of 3 people was heavily under stress and the number of invoices that were coming in for processing had increased to 100 per week from just 20 per week earlier.” To explain the increase in operational workload, Malav explained that each transaction in Pratilipi requires 5-7 operational check points. This meant that his small team’s task had increased from 100 to 600 checks every week.
Being a Series E funded firm further increased the complexity with more and more checkpoints required for the same number of invoices.”
- Complex approval workflows
- Delays in invoice approvals
- Difficulty managing input tax credit and expenses across business units
- Lack of centralized communication for stakeholders
- Challenges in closing books on time
To add on to his problems, the manual nature of tasks increased the probability of clerical errors by his team. The more the clerical errors, the higher the chances of lapses in internal financial controls. Malav was initially looking to expand his team and begin with the hiring process, until he found out about Pazy.
The Solution: Automating with Pazy
Pazy has taken the entire operational workload from our shoulders and given us time to breathe. Their automation of the entire Invoice to Payment flow and process has been a life-saver for us.
To begin with, Pazy automates the entire processes of collating invoices onto a single dashboard. It integrates the acceptance of invoices from multiple sources which includes WhatsApp, email, their own app or internal communicational tools such as Slack.
Then, it runs multiple operational level checks to figure errors in these invoices at the initial level itself. By the time they reach the finance team, their work is limited to checking on just a few financial parameters such as TDS rates. These check-points ensure that the probability of internal financial control lapses are reduced heavily.
Post the approvals, Pazy automatically books the expenses and also syncs with ERP like Tally. This integration has added to the reduction in workload and saving time for the finance team.
The automation does not stop here. “Pazy’s automation of uploading the files on the banking system has also saved us both time and effort. The fact that the payment can also be processed using Pazy adds to our thinking of Pazy as one complete solution.”
The automation of the entire process and integration with other tools ensures that Pazy becomes a one stop solution for anyone looking to automate their AP process.
I personally like how they have gone really deep to uncover the problems of finance teams. They have gone outside the process to uncover road blocks and reduce manual workload. The best example is their automation of vendor registration feature.” Pazy’s feature automatically detects an invoice from a new vendor and allows the team to automatically onboard the vendor and verify their GST and bank credentials from governmental filings.
This entire automation has reduced the time taken to handle this entire process by X number of hours.
The Results
We have been able to maintain a lean team despite the increase in workload and complexity and this has also saved me tons of effort which goes into hiring and managing a large team.
In any traditional firm that processes 1000 invoices per month, there is usually a team of 15+ people who look into the entire process. For a startup at Pratilipi’s size and scale, the team size would ideally stand anywhere between 7-10 people. However, with Pazy’s automation and seamless operational tool, they have managed to do the same amount of work with just 3 people.
This in turn allowed them to handle the increased workload at the same operational costs while increasing efficiency at the same time.
The automation of manual processes, the multiple operational check-points and the integrations have all ensured that we save on all the three aspects of time, effort and costs. Finally it also allowed us to strengthen our internal financial control checks and avoid errors.
Whenever there is an internal discussion of the operational work increasing, we just sit back and relax because we know that Pazy will take care of this.