The Challenge
Since I joined this organization, I realized that the Accounts Payable process was mired in the traditional way of doing things which involved a lot of paperwork. There was hardly any digitization or automation.” This statement was made by Satya Swaroop, who heads Finance at White Gold, a brand which buys gold from the public with full transparency and authenticity.
When Satya joined two years ago, the organization had established itself and operations were expanding rapidly. He saw that his small team of 4 people were being burdened with operational tasks. “If any department wants to get anything paid, be it small or big, it has to go through paper approvals, which basically takes a lot of time from the request to the payment stage.”
Solution had to automate the entire process of accounts payable, not just some pieces in between.
Satya’s problem was compounded if any corrections came along the way. The team had to go through the entire process of reprinting, getting the required set of approvals and then again uploading it for payments. Satya was clear on one thing from the beginning; he wanted automation in this department and the solution had to automate the entire process of accounts payable, not just some pieces in between.
The Search
Satya’s search first began with his existing vendors such as Razorpay which were also providing automated solutions for the AP process.
Someone was automating only the payment part or someone focused only on the invoice recording part.
However he soon realized that most of the solutions were automating bits and pieces of the process and there was a heavy focus on vendor management. To top it up, he found no platform which integrated with his current ERP Tally. “From documenting the request till the invoice is approved and paid, we wanted something that can sync across, have all of this in one platform.”
He was struggling in this search until he discovered Pazy and set up a demo call with Pratik, the co-founder.
The Solution
In the first demo itself, Satya realized that he had found the perfect solution. Pazy’s platform provided an end to end solution wherein the entire process of AP was automated. Infact, Pazy went one step ahead and automated the bank payments process as well.
One could now initiate the process of payments with approvals from within the platform itself. There was no need for the team to upload separate files on the banking system. The other critical aspect which immediately hooked Satya was Pazy’s integration with Tally. This saves the finance team from the tasks of uploading financial data on multiple platforms. On Pazy, you just need to click on the Sync button and it is done.
The other critical aspect which immediately hooked Satya was Pazy’s integration with Tally.
This syncing of data across platforms also made it easy for Satya’s team to deal with vendors as well. Very often vendors would come asking for the ledger in case of any issue and while Tally had all the information, it would just be a time consuming affair. Pazy on the other hand made this process much more simple and its easy to navigate platform would ensure that the data got retrieved and sorted in a matter of minutes.
Another feature which caught Satya’s attention was ‘Audit Trail. Pazy captures each and every single data point with every single piece of invoice that is uploaded. For example, who uploaded the invoice, the errors that showed up, who commented on it, when was the correct file uploaded, who approved it on what date and so on.
This allowed Satya and his team to deal with the audit process very seamlessly. Earlier, emergencies would often lead to breaking of the standard operating processes and it would be difficult to find the right audit trail during any audit process.
This problem was amplified given White Gold’s business model wherein they were constantly dealing with cash inflows and outflows. With Pazy, it was a breeze. All they need to do is type in a keyword and all the details of the invoice would pop up with the entire audit trail.
The Results
“Basically it’s freed up time for us folks at the finance team.”
As per Satya, the time taken to process a single invoice right from uploading it to making the payment is anywhere between 20 – 25 mins and this is under perfect conditions. “Pazy has bought this time down to 10 mins, which is less than half.”
In effect this means that Satya’s team was earlier spending an approx 185+ hours per month on just processing these invoices. Pazy bought this down to approx 85 hours. That was 100+ hours of time saved every month! This has ensured that the small team has now been able to process 500 invoices per month without having to break any sweat.
To sum it up in Satya’s words, “The processes are more streamlined now. We are getting more involved in the business. The risks are more controlled now.” The finance team finally has the mental and the time bandwidth to focus their attention on the more strategic tasks.