The problem

The accounts payable team needs to pay invoices in line with the trust’s standing financial instructions (SFIs) because otherwise we will not meet our better payment practice code (BPPC) target as a trust, and suppliers will not be paid in a timely manner.

The challenge

How can we promote timely goods receipt of purchase orders by end-users to ensure efficient matching and payment of on-hold invoices with minimal manual intervention, meeting the BPPC target?

The outputs

In the first three weeks (since implementation) the bot has reviewed 1,512 cases of invoices on hold. Of these 1,204 have resulted in an email being sent out to the requester, the remaining 308 have had exceptions (e.g. PO unmatched, requester out of scope, data is blank etc).

For every exception, creditors have received an email notifying them of this and out of the 1,204 successful cases, only 183 have required a day 13 email back to creditors so far.

The outcomes

Since launching the innovation accounts payable estimate this process has freed up circa 1 day a week of band 3 time to clear genuine queries.

In the weeks since launching we have met our BPPC target  (which we had not been doing prior to the implementation) which is a great outcome for our suppliers but also for the morale of the team, who have been working hard to meet this target for a long time.